Is Satellite Altimeter-based Sea Level Rise Acceleration from a Biased Water Vapor Correction?

March 7th, 2019 by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.

SUMMARY:Evidence is presented that an over-correction of satellite altimeter data for increasing water vapor might be at least partly responsible for the claimed “acceleration” of recent sea level rise.

UPDATE:A day after posting this, I did a rough calculation of how large the error in altimeter-based sea level rise could possibly be. The altimeter correction made for water vapor is about 6 mm in sea level height for every 1 mm increase in tropospheric water vapor. The trend in oceanic water vapor over 1993-2018 has been 0.48 mm/decade, which would require about [6.1 x 0.48=] ~3 mm/decade adjustment from increasing vapor. This can be compared to the total sea level rise over this period of 33 mm/decade. So it appears that even if the entire water vapor correction were removed, its impact on the sea level trend would reduce it by only about 10%.

I have been thinking about an issue for years that might have an impact on what many consider to be a standing disagreement between satellite altimeter estimates of sea level versus tide gauges.

Since 1993 when satellite altimeter data began to be included in sea level measurements, there has been some evidence that the satellites are measuring a more rapid rise than the in situ tide gauges are. This has led to the widespread belief that global-average sea level rise — which has existed since before humans could be blamed — is accelerating.

I have been the U.S. Science Team Leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-E) flying on NASA’s Aqua satellite. The water vapor retrievals from that instrument use algorithms similar to those used by the altimeter people.

I have a good understanding of the water vapor retrievals and the assumptions that go into them. But I have only a cursory understanding of how the altimeter measurements are affected by water vapor. I think it goes like this: as tropospheric water vapor increases, it increases the apparent path distance to the ocean surface as measured by the altimeter, which would cause a low bias in sea level if not corrected for.

What this potentially means is that *if* the oceanic water vapor trends since 1993 have been overestimated, too large of a correction would have been applied to the altimeter data, artificially exaggerating sea level trends during the satellite era.

What follows probably raises more questions that it answers. I am not an expert in satellite altimeters, I don’t know all of the altimeter publications, and this issue might have already been examined and found to be not an issue. I am merely raising a question that I still haven’t seen addressed in a few of the altimeter papers I’ve looked at.

Why Would Satellite Water Vapor Measurements be Biased?

The retrieval of total precipitable water vapor (TPW) over the oceans is generally considered to be one of the most accurate retrievals from satellite passive microwave radiometers.

Water vapor over the ocean presents a large radiometric signal at certain microwave frequencies. Basically, against a partially reflective ocean background (which is then radiometrically cold), water vapor produces brightness temperature (Tb) warming near the 22.235 GHz water vapor absorption line. When differenced with the brightness temperatures at a nearby frequency (say, 18 GHz), ocean surface roughness and cloud water effects on both frequencies roughly cancel out, leaving a pretty good signal of the total water vapor in the atmosphere.

What isn’t generally discussed, though, is that the accuracy of the water vapor retrieval depends upon the temperature, and thus vertical distribution, of the water vapor. Because the Tb measurements represent thermal emission by the water vapor, and the temperature of the water vapor can vary several tens of degrees C from the warm atmospheric boundary layer (where most vapor resides) to the cold upper troposphere (where little vapor resides), this means you could have two slightly different vertical profiles of water vapor producing different water vapor retrievals, even when the TPW in both cases was exactly the same.

The vapor retrievals, either explicitly or implicitly, assume a vertical profile of water vapor by using radiosonde (weather balloon) data from various geographic regions to provide climatological average estimates for that vertical distribution. The result is that the satellite retrievals, at least in the climatological mean over some period of time, produce very accurate water vapor estimates for warm tropical air masses and cold, high latitude air masses.

But what happens when both the tropics and the high latitudes warm? How do the vertical profiles of humidity change? To my knowledge, this is largely unknown. The retrievals used in the altimeter sea level estimates, as far as I know, assume a constant profile shape of water vapor content as the oceans have slowly warmed over recent decades.

Evidence of Spurious Trends in Satellite TPW and Sea Level Retrievals

For many years I have been concerned that the trends in TPW over the oceans have been rising faster than sea surface temperatures suggest they should be based upon an assumption of constant relative humidity (RH). I emailed my friend Frank Wentz and Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) a couple years ago asking about this, but he never responded (to be fair, sometimes I don’t respond to emails, either.)

For example, note the markedly different trends implied by the RSS water vapor retrievals versus the ERA Reanalysis in a paper published in 2018:

The upward trend in the satellite water vapor retrieval (RSS) is considerably larger than in the ERA reanalysis of all global meteorological data. If there is a spurious component of the RSS upward trend, it suggests there will also be a spurious component to the sea level rise from altimeters due to over-correction for water vapor.

Now look at the geographical distribution of sea level trends from the satellite altimeters from 1993 through 2015 (published in 2018) compared to the retrieved water vapor amounts for exactly the same period I computed from RSS Version 7 TPW data:

The geographic pattern of 23-years of sea level rise from satellite altimeter data looks similar to the pattern of water vapor increase (percent per decade), suggesting cross-talk between the water vapor correction and sea level retrieval.

There is considerably similarity to the patterns, which is evidence (though not conclusive) for remaining cross-talk between water vapor and the retrieval of sea level. (I would expect such a pattern if the upper plot was sea surface temperature, but not for the total, deep-layer warming of the oceans, which is what primarily drives the steric component of sea level rise).

Further evidence that something might be amiss in the altimeter retrievals of sea level is the fact that global-average sea level goes down during La Nina (when vapor amounts also go down) and rise during El Nino (when water vapor also rises). While some portion of this could be real, it seems unrealistic to me that as much as ~15 mm of globally-averaged sea level rise could occur in only 2 years going from La Nina to El Nino conditions (figure adapted from here) :

Especially since we know that increased atmospheric water vapor occurs during El Nino, and that extra water must come mostly from the ocean…yet the satellite altimeters suggest the oceans riserather than fall during El Nino?

The altimeter-diagnosed rise during El Nino can’t be steric, either. As I recall (e.g. Fig. 3b here), the vertically integrated deep-ocean average temperature remains essentially unchanged during El Nino (warming in the top 100 m is matched by cooling in the next 200 m layer, globally-averaged), so the effect can’t be driven by thermal expansion.

Finally, I’d like to point out that the change in the shape of the vertical profile of water vapor that would cause this to happen is consistent with our finding of little to no tropical “hot-spot” in the tropical mid-troposphere: most of the increase in water vapor would be near the surface (and thus at a higher temperature), but less of an increase in vapor as you progress upward through the troposphere. (The hotspot in climate models is known to be correlated with more water vapor increase in the free-troposphere).

Again, I want to emphasize this is just something I’ve been mulling over for a few years. I don’t have the time to dig into it. But I hope someone else will look into the issue more fully and determine whether spurious trends in satellite water vapor retrievals might be causing spurious trends in altimeter-based sea level retrievals.

The first problem is the opaque and openly activist group doing the altimetry work at C.U Bolder.

They now refuse to give the non “inverse barometer” corrected data. They add in a “correction” for allegedly deepening ocean basins giving sea levels which are floating phantom-like above the waves. This discrepancy gets larger every year.

When I questioned this they told me it was that they want MSL to be and “indicator” of global warming. So they have abandoned even the pretense that it is what it claims to be : sea level.

Even the suggestion that you can measure sea level to sub-millimeter precision from low orbit by looking at the TROUGH of the swell, is a joke. The have no ground zero data calibration, they just tweak the various model adjustments until they get an answer which fits their expectations ( or objectives ).

I stopped taking satellite altimetry seriously as soon as I looked into how it was done , how they stitched and altered previous mission data together and found the attitiude of the group by directly communication with them.

How many people ever heard of a “water vapor correction”? How many other “corrections” are there? Satellite altimetry, while sound in principle, does not work with the precision claimed. The sea surface is far from flat – how do they determine the average level to a sub-millimeter accuracy?

Uni of Colorado,like about 5 other institutes, do sea level as a function of volume. This is how they make the product applicable to to global climate change analysis.

It’s not nefarious, it’s the logical way of measuring change WRT to global climate. Other institutes look at different metrics. That’s fine, too. You use the data that applies to the question you’re asking.

So we might be counting fog as sea level rise? Interesting the same peeps demanding UAH numbers be adjusted for orbital drift and cloud cover overlook this possibility. And assuming sea level rise is 2 mm per year instead of 3, what implication does that have on ACO2 caused warming when we know within natural climate variability sea levels were as much as 20 meters higher in the last interglacial?

By now, most people engaged in looking at the satellite sea level problem agree that, in fact, there is a problem. After a quarter-century of satellite data analysis, three things are obvious.

The first, on the plus side, is that satellite readings accurately reflect Real world events, such as the anheric water acquisition of Australian aquifers in the 2010-2011 period. The worldwide drop in sea levels was accurately recorded by both altimeter and tide gauge Records.

Second, also on the plus side, is that altimeter readings from 1993 to the present, exhibit linearity, essentially over the entire period. This conforms to tide gauge readings too.

The third, on the negative side, show satellite data Analysis basically doubling the actual sea level rate of rise over the entire span. BWWC must be looked at as a possible source of reportage that is beginning to border upon ludicrous. Coding errors attempting to reconcile radars lacking the ability (from a resolution standpoint) to make precise measurements by more than an order or two of magnitude are another possibility that needs detailed attention. Both deserve intensive investigation, and they deserve it soon.

I have found many tide gauges in tectonically inert places on the globe – places that neither subside nor uplift, and those with greater than a 100 year record and 10 year GPS validation show a steady, linear (unchanging in rate) 1 to 1.4mm/yr non-accelerating rise. This is where you can “…find the ‘actual’ rate of rise” as you requested.

Go to the bottom of the Media Page on the colderside.com website for the EIKE presentation in Munich this past November, for some more detail, particularly on the coding issue. Yet BWWC is a realistic alternative too to “explain” the doubling (including GIA) problem.

PS The great Swedish oceanographer Nils Axel-Mrner has confirmed likewise!

If there are discrepancies between satellite and tide gauges that are tectonically stable, the first thing I would check is if the stable gauges are evenly spread over the globe, or if they were concentrated somewhere, such that the results could be skewed, just because sea level changes are not uniform across the globe (ie, from Coriolis effect etc).

If you look at enough tidal gauge data since early 1900’s there is no evidence of acceleration, at least none that I have found on the NOAA web site. SLR has been constant and linear ranging from 1-4 mm per year depending the port. I think I trust the individual tidal gauge data over everything else.

If you average individual sites with time point inconsistent data (ex. different start-stop time interval)s it is possible they are averaging apples and oranges which could show acceleration when none exists. This is why I put emphasis on individual sites, since the measurement system is not changing.

Sorry, this is a pseudoproblem, just like with temperatures. You have since evah min and max readings, recently avg as well.

Conversely, using single stations as did steve moves you exactly into that maximum of uncertainty you claimed to exist in the global averaging method.

The reason is that if you want to extract a valuable trend estimate out of your data, single points are worst, as they create time series with high deviations from the mean, what de facto increases the standard error.

Thus instead of obtaining 1.8 +- 0.05 mm/yr, you get 1.3 +- 0.9 or the like, and you still know nothing.

You see that perfectly when processing UAH’s grid data, and generate a monthly time series out of single grid cells vs. great areas.

I see your point but I think is more than a pseudo problem since most tidal gauge sites start on different years. So if you average a site which is at 2 mm/year starting in 1910 (usually the standard error is small on these measurements) and then average a site which is at 4 mm/yr starting in 1950, then the overall graph will show acceleration when none exists at either site.

Interesting. I think to first order if the water vapour correction is correct the El Nio and and La Nia s should have zero effect. Is a variation of 15 mm on the world wide average consistent with zero? Id doubt that.

The improvements in retracking have been accompanied by equally important improvements in some of the corrections that need to be applied to altimetry data to account for atmospheric path delays and other geophysical effects.

The two major improvements are in the correction of the path delay due to tropospheric water vapour (wet tropospheric correction, see Obligis et al. 2011) and in the tide models that are needed for all those applications where the tidal component is not part of the observed signal and need to be removed (Ray et al. 2011).

Here we will briefly summarize the main advances in the wet tropospheric correction, while for the improvement in tidal models we refer to the comprehensive review by Stammer et al. (2014).

Dear Dr. Spencer: Very interesting question posed in your post. I have been checking the research that I can find regarding the prediction stated in the Charney Report, that we should be seeing an increase in the water vapor content in the upper troposphere if current global warming theory is correct. In your chart above, the data from ERA-Interim seems to show basically shows no trend from 1979 to 2015. The heritage date from radiosondes going back to 1948 showed a downward trend, but was deemed faulty. I have examined perhaps 9 relatively recent studies that appear to contradict the theory, with many of the conclusions from those studies indicating that their results were inconclusive, or that additional study with more refined techniques were needed. Many of these studies showed decreasing water vapor trends over time, particularly over land.

It would appear that perhaps the empirical data isn’t cooperating with theory, but the powers that be don’t wish to acknowledge this problem.

The claimed accuracy for sea level satellite altimetry (by some) appears to be physically impossible (as you are probably aware, even satellite orbits change with variations to the geoid, which are unpredictable.)

The technology is incredible, but trying to measure the distance of something several hundred kilometres away, through a constantly variable stmosphere, from a constantly shifting platform, is not easy. Accuracy to within a few centimetres seems achievable, for a relatively stationary object.

Measuring the tidally changing ocean surface (given that tides, in fact, are not nearly as predictable as some might think), to claimed averages is probably wishful thinking.

Still, if one can get paid for one’s hobby, why not? It’s better than working for a living.

But you’re speaking about two different worlds. One world is where science and technology are merged with free market capitalism. The other world is where science is merged with academia and leftists. It is junk science.

All the things on your list have been made useful by the combination of free market capitalism merging with science and technology, except only partially in the case of weather prediction which has mostly been advanced by NOAA in cooperation with the military. Though today many fine capitalistic organizations are popping up with “useful” weather prediction as a free market product.

Thus far how many things can you name have been useful coming out of academic climate science? I recall predictions of an ice free arctic by 2013 that spurred a tremendous amount of investment that so far has resulted in expected outcomes, lets see there was the UK faux pas over snowless winters followed immediately by a high snowfall winter that left UK planners flatfooted and unprepared. There was the Hansen prediction of the Manhattan freeway underwater by now. Gee thats three can you come up with a couple on the other side?

But the point is that all these things germinated as academic interest. This is what is being poo-pooed, in the usual stupid ignorance that we see from idiots who think that politics is the lens through which everything operates.

Well not all germinated in academia. Academia certainly has a role to fill but the important element of what I said was the point new science becomes useful.

Governments are not ruled out from making science useful but they aren’t particularly good at it or efficient. More than 20 years of employment in the conservation sector by far the most moving factor for the advancement of conservation is via consumers selecting it and paying extra dollars to achieve it. Politics when it moves in the direction of dictating to its citizens what is good for them more typically simply creates resistance.

Its important to know the weakness of a committee or select group of people dictating needs to others. People are smart and will select in most cases what is good for them. Certainly drug addicts, alcoholics, and a number of other subgroups are not functional in that area but they are in the minority.

B. Hunter, As in your previous postings, your focus on “conservation” appears to refer to the ideas of Peter Huber. His prescription is similar to that of the Nature Conservancy which purchases lands to limit development and to other ideas such as putting a price on pollution and designating areas as park or wilderness lands. Those approaches depend on governments which support these concepts, but ignores the fact that governments change and then policies do as well.

The other side of the problem is that “developing” those areas may later provide profit opportunities which the next government would decide to allow. Mining gold or other minerals and drilling for oil on government lands are much more likely as the market prices increase to reflect the scarcity of each. Afican elephants and rinos present valuable commodities in one market far from the local government. As a result, we are observing the gradual of their numbers, leading to extinction. Other species with less apparent “value” are already gone and the rate of extinction appears to be increasing.

“Thus far how many things can you name have been useful coming out of academic climate science?”

Well you will of course disagree, but has been very useful in making us aware of serious risks to humans and economic development.

For example, the Midwest Climate Assessment has specifically pointed to more extreme precipitation events in that region, leading to more extreme flooding events, and the need of a better management system for whole watershed

E. Swanson – I would not limit conservation to simple economics. Times change as you point out and values change. Conservation vs preservation is about finding a balance between preservation and use that wholly embraces all values at all extremes and fully in between. What we see too much of is proponents of one extreme or the other dominating politically. As we know elections have consequences but there are far better models than pure politics and too the victor goes the spoils. That’s so European!

This nation is based on a populist notion of an entitlement to pursue happiness and to accomplish that each and every person’s interest has equal value. Finding solutions via an elite intelligentsia is a big step backwards. True academic freedom is a great thing as long as it doesn’t then lead to the loss of somebody else’s chances to pursue happiness. Academic freedom is incompatible with freedom when the academic point of view is elevated about that of the common person. Yes science is critical and facts derived from science needs to be considered, but that’s science not the opinion of scientists which is not science.

The key concept in Huber’s book is the concept of what we are capable of knowing. The Roosevelt point of view was the aesthetics of the common man and how those aesthetics lead to a robust life. The Al Gore point of view is pessimistic and gives value to concepts we know nothing about. . . .like what really is “saving the world”. Save it from what? Save it from being touched by mankind in any way shape or form that isn’t perceived as beneficial by the elite class.

According to an analysis by Willis Eschenbach, a somewhat regular article writer at Watts Up With That, sea level rise according to tide gauges was .76 mm/year greater in 1993-2013 than in 1972-1992. This is a counterpoint to the 2.1 mm/year increase according to Church and White (cited in a Nerem and Fasullo paper mentioned in his WUWT article, below) with satellite data used for 1993-onwards.

“The first, on the plus side, is that satellite readings accurately reflect Real world events, such as the anheric water acquisition of Australian aquifers in the 2010-2011 period. The worldwide drop in sea levels was accurately recorded by both altimeter and tide gauge Records.”

Nevertheless, it does give a hint as to the solution to rising sea levels, as the climate continues to warm. If all countries that experience periodic flooding were to construct dams or inland lakes to prevent future damage to homes and infrastructure and to reduce the amount of water flowing back to the sea during periods of heavy rain, then sea level rise could be stopped. The land would become more fertile, and food production would increase. It would be a win, win for everyone.

Presumably if sea levels continue to rise at 3.5mm/year in the middle of the oceans and only 1.7mm/year on average at the coasts, ships will soon need to use extra fuel to haul themselves up as they leave port, but on the plus side, they’ll be able to idle their engines and coast downhill into harbour. /sarc

This example of a correction is far from my understanding. But if I step back there is a trend where nearly every data modification favors the hypothesis of global warming. For me, corrections are most obviously biased in the sunspot number adjustments compared to isotope data for solar activity that indicate the original numbers were better, but point is- why is the bias always supporting global warming? Also tidal data are heavily impacted by other processes- is there a global data set?

Aaron,
It is because this is not a scientific endeavor with the alarmists. This is a political agenda. The left has fully infiltrated academia and science. The left is so twisted in its ideology that anything is possible. To ask if is there a global data set is pointless. The foxes are guarding the henhouse. To trust anything that is produced at this point then you’d have to question your grasp on reality.

I would argue that only the left is currently blocking science based on their faith. Sure the right denies human evolution but they dont stop the research or conversations. The left on the other hand (pun intended) has totally blocked research into human variability and diversity as well as used irrational social consequences to anyone that speaks up about empirical realities against their ideology. Climate science is more subtle than biological denialism but I agree there is a systemic bias. Academics for example have selected who can play and in my experience peer review is a classic example of bias. It is easy to publish or get funding supporting agw but not for natural climate change.

In my view we need to articulate and categorize the left’s religion more clearly so that people can keep it seperate from government and especially academics. Our society is currently endoctrinating into a religion in academia and I am not comfortable with this because it violates the constitutional law. Either they should give up their funding or remove the faith based curriculum.

I understand. I imagine it is difficult to imagine how the microevolutionary processes add up to macroevolutionary change over millions of years, and the role of extinction and mass extinction play in rolling the dice for life. I wish there was a way to discuss this issue in a constructive way. I fear there is not. Whales are not from a mole rate, their closest common ancestor is the hippo lineage.

25 years ago the fossil record and the genetic methods were incomplete compared to today. Now the genetics, fossil record and taxonomic record are all aligned with modern dating methods. Over and over the theory is tested and stands up. Its a shame the critisism of biased climate science looses credibility by lumping with sincere science denial. Faith is a hell of a drug. It creates purpose, which is so much more powerful than the pleasure from drugs like cocaine. So I get it, and you are likely a good guy and productive member of society. So how about we just agree to disagree Stephen?

“Now the genetics, fossil record and taxonomic record are all aligned with modern dating methods.”

DNA is a huge problem for evolution, not proof. The “fossil record” is a pipe dream. And radiometric dating is as close to bogus as it gets.

“Over and over the theory is tested and stands up.”

Countless lab experiments have been performed to create life “in a test tube”. All have failed. Millions of dollars have been spent trying to breed faster racehorses. Speeds aren’t getting any faster. Secretariat (1973) stilll holds the Kentucky Derby record.

It is unfortunate to hear misinformation. As a Geologist/ with a Biology undergrad I am an avid fossil collector, especially of Intermediate fossils. There is nothing more concrete as evidence than holding the well preserved fossil of an extinct animal in my hands. It is false to state the fossil record is a pipe dream or requires faith. Regarding dating there are cases where 3 independent labs test the same material and provide the same age results, or even more personally I have seen a series of a dozen or so of volcanic ash beds layered in marine sediments sent to a lab and produce a perfect chronology whereby each bed was in the proper order. Even more astonishing is seeing highly sampling rates capture an evolutionary event of a population of forams or nano fossils. This is another way to date material. Genetics for humans is a bit of a biased field in the professional industry, but the method is solid and repeatable. The amount of Neanderthal DNA now available from multiple individuals confirms that even ancient DNA is scientifically testable and very real. Now I do agree there is uncertainty for things like genetic clocks, but even science has learned not they are hit or miss sometimes. The problem is the sceptical argument against repeated bias from the UN and IPCC and media and even academia losses credibility from lumping the two groups of creationists and climate sceptics. Regardless, my biggest fear today are from the left that are blocking the impacts of evolution to explain aspects of society, like pay gaps or SAT math scores even crime rates. So I no longer consider creationism the biggest fear, but I do wish the trend was for Christianity to be more aligned with solid science. I think the good sides of the Christian belief system would help society if credibility was higher and membership increased. I think many people fear the misalignment with science and flee the church and find the secular ideology of the left as a substitute.

“The political right has an embedded religion, Christianity. The political left has an embedded religion, a faith based secular ideology.”

So many errors. The “right” is associated with, but by no means defined by religiosity – that’s just the media,popular and semi-popular, throwing the connection in your face hard enough to stop you having to actual think about it.

Atheism and agnosticism are not religions. Neither is ‘humanism’.

I recommend checking a few dictionaries on what ‘religion’ actually means, and not relying on the absurd false equivalency promulgated by some hard-core f^ckwits.

To whit – religion is a moral code of which the absolute authority resides in (the belief of) a supernatural entity or entities.

Your response seems a bit aggressive, but it is understandable that there is a lot of passion behind this subject- which is why we seldom discuss it. I will gladly explain my perspective just so you know what is the foundation of the statement.

You Say: “So many errors. The right is associated with, but by no means defined by religiosity thats just the media,popular and semi-popular, throwing the connection in your face hard enough to stop you having to actual think about it.”

Would the conservative right party exist without the religious (specifically evangelical) vote? Politics is a numbers game in reality. This is why Trump- a man with questionable morality based on Christian values aligned with Mike Pence. The political card needs that Christian and Evangelical vote to win. So I agree that the right or conservative ideals are indeed not religious, but I also stand by my statement that Christianity is embedded in the right political party because they would not win without the vote numbers.

You say “To whit religion is a moral code of which the absolute authority resides in (the belief of) a supernatural entity or entities.”

That seems a rather western biased definition as much of the eastern world’s religions (Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism) do not include a super-natural framework- and represent a very large percentage of the world’s population. Thus, I prefer the actual etymology of the word Religion: to Bind, Bond, have Reverence. Thus, a religion is a structure that binds our way of thinking. In this way other belief systems fit under a bigger umbrella, and the western bias is reduced. I think this is critical because the political left is getting away including faith based ideology that violates the constitution if it is considered a religion: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Much of the left ideology is not supported by empirical data and thus has drifted into the sub-set of a religion. For example, US academia is severely biased by this religious ideology, and since they get federal funding we are in essence choosing a side via funding one belief system. The issue also extends outward to laws. The only way I can see to establish a unbiased legal system is to classify the left ideology for what it is: A faith based religious belief system.

Pages like this one drive home the point. We exclude funding for religions, but in a slight of hand openly fund faith based ideologies because they are not classified correctly.

Pretty much all that can be said is expressed by “Religion: to Bind, Bond, have Reverence.”

Not having reverence is essentially having reverence of yourself. Thus we all are religious just that some of us are not humble.

I would strongly suggest reading the recent dissent by Justice Kavanaugh on the issue of governments funding religious institutions. Justice Kavanaugh seems to have a very good grasp of a subject that in popular thought elevates form over substance. In this regard I believe our founding fathers were far more nuanced in their view of religion than the public is today.

As to Trump I don’t see him as being the antithesis to Christianity. Trump is simply more honest and open to his natural self than has been traditionally allowed in ancient and fundamentalist Christianity but that isn’t at all unique today and actually wasn’t at all unique way back when I first started feeling my oats some 60+ years ago.

If the losses of the Antarctic Peninsula and parts of West Antarctica continue to increase at the same rate theyve been increasing for the last two decades, the losses will catch up with the long-term gain in East Antarctica in 20 or 30 years — “

While the Clausius-Clapeyron equation is very important as it determines the saturation vapour pressure, in practice it is replaced by empirical, typically Magnus type, equations which are more accurate. It is shown that the reduced accuracy reflects an inconsistent assumption that the latent heat of vaporization is constant. Not only is this assumption unnecessary and excessive, but it is also contradictory to entropy maximization. Removing this assumption and using a pure entropy maximization framework we obtain a simple closed solution, which is both theoretically consistent and accurate. Our discussion and derivation are relevant to students and specialists in statistical thermophysics and in geophysical sciences, and our results are ready for practical application in physics as well as in such disciplines as hydrology, meteorology and climatology.

On the widely misunderstood entropy maximization, I posted this originally at Judith Curry’s blog (Feb. 28, 2019)

Popular accounts of the second law of thermodynamics are quite different from the formal statement of the law. Popular accounts say entropy is always increasing. The formal statement is more restrictive. Kelvin and Clausius statements of the second law refer to heat engines and the conversion of heat to work. The second law is a generalization of the operation of heat engines. The Strangelove theorem is a more general formulation of the second law that does not use heat engines and heat conversion. It describes pure heat transfer from hot to cold matter.

2nd law of thermodynamics (Strangelove theorem):
Entropy decreases in heat transfer from hot to cold matter.

Since: 0 < Tc < Th
Let: Tc = a Th
Where: 0 < a 1
At lower limit a = 0, the right side of equation is less than 1:
(Ch Cc)/Ch < 1
At upper limit a = 1, the left side of equation equals 1:
(Sh + Sc)/(Sh + Sc) = 1
At upper limit a = 1, the right side of equation is less than 1:
(Ch Cc)/(Ch + Cc) (Ch – Cc) / (Ch + a Cc)
Therefore, the premise that S1 = S2 is false because S1 > S2.This proves the Strangelove theorem that entropy decreases in heat transfer from hot to cold matter.

2nd law of thermodynamics (Strangelove theorem) in statistical mechanics

The Strangelove theorem is originally expressed in classical thermodynamics. It can also be expressed in statistical mechanics. In statistical mechanics, entropy (S) is given by the Boltzmann formula:
S = k ln W
Where: k is Boltzmann constant; ln is natural logarithm; W is number of possible microstates corresponding to a macrostate
Strangelove theorem states that entropy decreases in heat transfer from hot to cold matter.

The initial entropy (S1) is the sum of the entropies of hot and cold matter:
S1 = Sh + Sc
Where: Sh is entropy of hot matter; Sc is entropy of cold matter
Sh = k ln (H^m)
Sc = k ln (C^n)
Where: H and C are number of energy states in hot and cold matter respectively; m and n are number of particles in hot and cold matter respectively
The final entropy (S2) is the entropy of all the particles (sum of hot and cold particles) after heat transfer:
S2 = k ln (A^(m + n))
Where: A is number of energy states after heat transfer from hot to cold matter

I will not give a general analytical solution because it is trivial to show that numerical solutions exist that satisfy all the required conditions. Therefore, Strangelove theorem is true in statistical mechanics. This proves that my theorem is not just mathematics. It is a law of nature because it is true in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, two established branches of physics.

Dr. Strangelove, I understand why you believe this is relevent to the post topic, and I don’t want to get any further off topic. But, your “premise” (S1 = S2) would not be true, in general. IOW, there would be many situations where it was not true. So, “disproving” an inaccurate premise would not be “proof” of anything, except the premise was wrong.

But, I always appreciate challenges to established physics. That is one of the reasons we know valid science can be trusted. It has withstood the test of time, unlike pseudoscience, which fails miserably.

You entirely miss the point. Strangelove theorem states S1 > S2
That is what is proven in the mathematical proof. The premise S1 = S2 is just a “placeholder.” I could have started with the premise S1 > S2 and concluded the premise is true

To clarify, my theorem does not disprove Clausius statement of the 2nd law. The consequence of Clausius statement:
(cyclic) dS > = 0
Translation: In a cyclic thermodynamic process, the change in entropy is greater than or equal to zero.
In absolute entropy, it translates to:
S2 > = S1
It seems to contradict Strangelove theorem:
S1 > S2
But as I already explained, Clausius statement refers to heat engines. My theorem refers to pure heat transfer so it is a more general law. In my paper, I explained why entropy is increasing in heat engines.

Your equations apparently lost some minus signs, in the cut/paste process. That’s not your fault, but it makes for a fun puzzle as I try to follow your “proof”. I would need more time to work the puzzle, but I keyed on your statement: “Therefore, the premise that S1 = S2 is false because S1 > S2. This proves the Strangelove theorem that entropy decreases in heat transfer from hot to cold matter.”

You appeared to be stating that since S1 = S2 is wrong, your “proof” is correct. I don’t agree with that logic, because I don’t agree S1 = S2, in general.

A hot object and a cold object, in a closed system, would eventually reach the same temperature. If S1 were the entropy at the start, and S2 the entropy at the end, then S1 < S2.

If you understand the proof, you would agree it is correct. Ask all the physicists you know to falsify it. No hand waving please. It is a mathematical proof. It should be easy to point out what particular equation is wrong.

Of course S1 = S2 is false. My theorem falsified it. But more importantly, if you understood the proof, I proved that S1 > S2 in all cases. Some equations disappeared in the cut and paste. I post it again (hoping they do not disappear)

They disappeared again. (This is hopeless) I post it again removing all the symbols

Let: Tc = a Th
Where: a is greater than 0 and less than 1
Substitute Tc into Equation 5
Cancel out Th in the equation
Left side of equation
(Sh + Sc)/(Sh + a Sc)
Ride side of equation
(Ch – Cc)/(Ch + a Cc)

Evaluate the equation at the limits of a
At lower limit a = 0, the left side of equation is greater than 1
At lower limit a = 0, the right side of equation is less than 1
At upper limit a = 1, the left side of equation equals 1
At upper limit a = 1, the right side of equation is less than 1

Hence, at upper and lower limits and at all values of a between the limits, left side is greater than right side of equation.
Therefore, S1 > S2. This proves the Strangelove theorem that entropy decreases in heat transfer from hot to cold matter.

At the end of your transfer, both objects are at the same temperature. No temperature differential available to be utilised to do work. Maximum entropy.

Maybe you are using a pseudoscientific definition of entropy. If not, your “proof” is bollocks. More stupidity of the Tim Folkerts type. Trying to “prove” that ice can raise the temperature of water by means of mathematics is as silly as claiming that there is a “theory of global warming”.

Just hand waving from people who don’t understand math and physics. Obviously you don’t know the difference between Clausius statement and Strangelove theorem of the 2nd law of thermodynamics. For the benefit of people who understand math and physics, I will show the difference (For the science illiterate, sorry I cannot help you. Just memorize what you read at Wiki without understanding anything)

Clausius statement:
S1 < S2
Where: S1 is initial entropy; S2 is final entropy after heat transfer
S1 = Sh = Qh/Th
Where: Sh is entropy of hot working fluid in heat engine; Qh and Th are heat energy and temperature of hot fluid respectively
Qo = Qh – W
Where: Qo is heat outflow from heat engine; W is work done by heat engine
This equation is the conservation of energy (1st law of thermodynamics) Heat energy of the hot fluid is converted into work and the residual heat energy is the heat outflow.
Qo = Qf + dQ
Where: Qf is heat energy of cool fluid; dQ is heat lost to surrounding air and cooling system of engine
S2 = Qo/Tf
Where: Tf is temperature of cool fluid
Combining these equations:
Qh/Th S2
S1 = Sh + Sc = Qh/Th + Qc/Tc
Where: Sc is entropy of cool air and engine; Qc and Tc are heat energy and temperature of cool air and engine
S2 = Qf/Tf + (Qc + dQ)/(Tc + dT)
Where: dT is increase in temperature of air and engine
The equation states that the final entropy is the entropy of cool fluid plus the entropy of surrounding air and engine after heat transfer.
Combining these equations:
Qh/Th + Qc/Tc > Qf/Tf + (Qc + dQ)/(Tc + dT)

See the equations of Clausius statement and Strangelove theorem are different. My theorem includes the entropies of hot and cool matter. Clausius statement accounts only for change in entropy of hot fluid. My theorem is a more complete accounting of entropy. Clausius statement is not wrong but incomplete. It treats the working fluid as a closed thermodynamic system and nothing wrong with that.

None of that contradicts Strangelove theorem. So I guess you agree. BTW I have a disproof of the 3rd law of thermodynamics. The 3rd law was invented before quantum mechanics. It can be violated using quantum statistical mechanics.

Many people don’t know that general relativity violates the conservation of energy (1st law of thermodynamics) But I’m not convinced general relativity has the final say because energy is conserved in quantum mechanics.

Please cite violation of conservation of energy in general relativity. I suspect Einstein was well aware of the laws of thermodynamics, and that he didn’t come up with a way to create or destroy energy (including mass equivalence of energy according to the most famous one of the equations of special relativity, E=mc^2).

Einstein inserted the cosmological constant in his field equations. This is now interpreted as dark energy that causes the acceleration of space expansion. The violation of conservation of energy can be expressed in Newtonian mechanics as increase in BOTH potential energy and kinetic energy (conservation requires inverse proportionality between PE and KE) In general relativity, it is expressed as constant energy density coupled with increasing spatial volume (energy is being created)

I predict energy is conserved in the unified theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. Einstein knew his theory is not the final one. He spent the last 40 years of his life searching in vain for the unified field theory.

By the way, it is not just a prediction. Energy is really conserved in my Unified Theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. First, I will show how general relativity violates the conservation of energy. Friedmann equations are a solution to Einsteins field equations. It describes the expansion of space. FRW metric defines the scale factor (a) as:
a = Ro/R
where: Ro is radius of universe when light from distant galaxy is observed; R is radius of universe when light from distant galaxy was emitted
In theory of relativity, space and time are a single entity called spacetime. Hence, expansion of space has a corresponding expansion of time or time dilation. Spacetime expansion is defined as:
d = a d
t = a t
where: d is length or distance expansion; d is distance without expansion; t is time dilation; t is time without expansion

Noethers theorem states that every conservation law is associated with a mathematical symmetry. If the symmetry is broken, the conservation law is violated. I will show how spacetime expansion breaks the symmetry of Equation 1. Express velocity in terms of distance and time:
v = d/t
Substitute into Equation 1:
-G M m/r = p d/t
Since r is distance, it has a length expansion (r = a r). Write Equation 1 with spacetime expansion:
-G M m/r = p d/t
Substitute the spacetime expansion formulas:
-G M m/(a r) = p a d/(a t)
Cancel a in the equation:
-G M m/(a r) = p d/t
Substitute v for d/t and call this Equation 2:
-G M m/(a r) = p v

Now put Equation 1 and Equation 2 side by side:
-G M m/r = p v
-G M m/(a r) = p v
Notice the right side of the equations looks the same. Symmetry is preserved on the right side. But the left side of the equations looks different. Symmetry is broken on the left side. This is the violation of the conservation law of energy.

Next I will show how my Unified Theory of relativity and quantum mechanics restores the symmetry of Equation 1 and Equation 2. The scale factor (a) is related to the cosmological redshift (z):
a = 1 + z = yo/y
where: yo is observed wavelength of light from distant galaxy; y is emitted wavelength of light from distant galaxy
Since y is a length, the length expansion (y) is equal to the observed wavelength:
y = a y = yo

De Broglie predicted the existence of matter-waves that have been confirmed by experiments. Matter-wave is the basis of the wavefunction and the Schrodinger wave equation, the foundations of quantum mechanics. Matter-wave is given by the De Broglie equation:
y = h/p
p = h/y
where: y is wavelength of matter-wave; h is Planck constant; p is momentum
Substitute p into Equation 2:
-G M m/(a r) = (h/y) v
Substitute y = a y to include length expansion:
-G M m/(a r) = (h/y) v = h/(a y) v
Cancel a in the equation:
-G M m/r = (h/y) v
Substitute p = h/y into the equation:
-G M m/r = p v
This is how Equation 2 looks like after unifying with quantum mechanics. Looks familiar?

Now put Equation 1 and Equation 2 (with quantum mechanics) side by side:
-G M m/r = p v
-G M m/r = p v
Symmetry is restored on the left side of the equations. Therefore, energy is conserved in my Unified Theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. Einstein would be pleased. I fixed his theory so it doesnt violate the conservation of energy 🙂

NOAA just released updated tidal gauge data, showing a rise of i.8 to 1.9mm per year. The satellite measure of 3.2mm is so far out from that, I suspect it is fatally flawed. The reason I say that is that anecdotal evidence from many parts of the world seem in line with the tidal gauge data. To put it simply people who work with the sea like fishermen, coastal protection engineers and so on, say they have not experienced a rise of the magnitude the satellites suggest, and these are people who have worked with the sea for far longer than satellites have existed.

Looking at sealevel rise as to whether it rates any alarm is pretty much an exercise solely for worriers.

Fact is average sealevel rise since the height of the last glacial maximum has averaged 6.5mm/year over the past 20,000 years. Getting excited about possible acceleration from 1.8mm/yr to 3.2mm/yr needs to be examined in light of “natural” climate change before trying to attribute any of it to anthropogenic causes. I suppose if it blows by 6.5mm/yr a full quarter inch a year we probably should start getting concerned. I mean isn’t that a consistent way we treat numbers we don’t know the history of (unprecedented! warming faster than evolution and adaptation etal?) Before then the only useful use seems to be the accretion of power and whether we should be oppressing the people of the world to our own personally imagined advantage.

Fact is average sealevel rise since the height of the last glacial maximum has averaged 6.5mm/year over the past 20,000 years. Getting excited about possible acceleration from 1.8mm/yr to 3.2mm/yr needs to be examined in light of natural climate change

So if the warming globe brings our sea level rise rate to 6.5 mm/year, that’s 6.5 centimetres a decade, which is 65 cm a century.

That puts Amsterdam underwater by the middle of next century. Tuvalu and Funafuti are gone.

Barry says: “So if the warming globe brings our sea level rise rate to 6.5 mm/year, that’s 6.5 centimetres a decade, which is 65 cm a century.That puts Amsterdam underwater by the middle of next century. Tuvalu and Funafuti are gone.

But they’re foreign people, so who cares?”

And gee thats just a part of what nature is capable of!

The 6.5mm/yr average is a long term average. No doubt nature saw much higher rates of sealevel change over selected multi-decadal periods of time during the past 20 millennia. Just in the last millennia we saw glaciers advance and we saw them retreat suggesting the 6.5mm figure is far less than what nature has been capable of recently (in geological time frames). Since thats pretty solid science its pretty crazy to get excited about a modest rate of change. Multi-decadal variation is possibly just showing us a variation between 1.8mm/yr and 3.2mm/yr during the past century and a half and just when nature is moving us out of several hundred years of glacial accumulation where sea level was likely dropping.

Folks actually need to digest a bit regarding man’s inherent ability to easily adapt to far higher rates of change than we are seeing right now. Simple because we are becoming more sedentary in our lives isn’t any reason to believe that’s a necessity for survival.

Earth is a “water” planet. If all the land were plowed into the ocean depths, water would cover everything by well over a mile (1.6 km). Constant and continual land erosion fills the oceans. Long term, 1000s of years, more and more coastal land area will have to be protected.

If you live in a low area near an ocean, don’t complain if you have waist-deep water in your kitchen next storm surge.

Taxing CO2 emissions will do NOTHING to stop rising sea levels, because rising sea levels are not caused by mankind. Rising sea levels are natural and unstoppable.

We need to stop wasting “billions and billions” on AGW nonsense, and start reclaiming/protecting coastal areas.

Fact is average sealevel rise since the height of the last glacial maximum has averaged 6.5mm/year over the past 20,000 years.

That looks like a red hereing to me. Most of the post LGM sea-level rise of some 125 meters was over and done by the beginning of the Holocene. What’s happened since was a much slower rate of rise, since the large glaciers which existed over land in the NH after the Eemian are now gone, except for that over Greenland.
Then, Hunter segways into a political comment

Before then the only useful use seems to be the accretion of power and whether we should be oppressing the people of the world to our own personally imagined advantage.

Implying that the entire environmental “movement” is just a ploy for a power grab by a a small group with authoritarian goals, a standard right wing political world view. All I can say is I think you are wrong.

Well technically the holocene started during the most dramatic rise in sea level. Local anthropology work on the west coast suggests that early American inhabitants 11k years ago have their coast side settlements in what is now 80meters of water. Which suggests that the past 11k years the average has been 7mm/yr. But yes most of that occurred in the early holocene. What we don’t know very well is what normal fluctuation rates of sea level rise is given that during the LIA glaciers advanced for some 400 years and have been retreating for 150 years. So if we have seen rates between 1.8 and 3.2mm/year in the last 60 some years, it was probably a lot slower or maybe even slightly declining during the LIA.

The only point I would make is it would take some pretty comprehensive work, which I have not seen, to create any sense that current sea level is accelerating from human emissions. Its easy to stand up and declare that with sketchy data but scientists have been doing that consistently for the past 1500 plus years.

“Before then the only useful use seems to be the accretion of power and whether we should be oppressing the people of the world to our own personally imagined advantage.”

Implying that the entire environmental “movement” is just a ploy for a power grab by a a small group with authoritarian goals, a standard right wing political world view. All I can say is I think you are wrong.”

Where did I say the entire environmental movement? I didn’t. I am talking about gamers who are either ignorant or have an agenda to cherry pick facts to advance political action. What government needs to do is weigh these sort of comments as individual opinions and not give them the color of expert truth. Gaming is popular because people are gullible, especially when the messenger can be looked as an idol or an expert.

Bottom line here is the current rate of sealevel rise is very modest in comparison to what mankind has had to adapt to the in the past with a whole lot less technology and knowledge than we have today. I am certainly not lambasting the entire environmental movement as I am an environmentalist myself. Just one who tends rely on facts that can be tested a lot more than emotion and hubris.

Nate says: “You have it entirely backwards, Bill. Paleolithic people could easily adapt because they could gradually move away from rising sea level for their hunting and gathering needs.

Today, we have massive cities and infrastructure that are not so easily moved.”

Nate I know you like to pop off about stuff you know almost nothing about. Depreciation and maintenance costs on infrastructure severely limits its value over time. 30 years is the approximate accounting standard for full value of infrastructure to be utilized and consumed. Just about the entire US highway system has been built, rebuilt, and rebuilt again in the last 60 years.

Yeah a few monuments keep getting face lifts because of their historical significance but the infrastructure argument pretty much only applies to relatively short term disasters. We had James Hansen the scientist without a specialty telling us the East highway running outside of his Manhattan office building would be underwater by now. All this stuff is just an example of the inmates running the asylum.

“Depreciation and maintenance costs on infrastructure severely limits its value over time. 30 years is the approximate accounting standard for full value of infrastructure to be utilized and consumed.”

Yeah Bill, its not like land in Manhattan has much value. Simple enough to pick up and build all those buildings uphill.

Just to be clear. You think it’s no big deal to move NY, Boston, Miami, New Orleans, Venice, etc to higher ground?

“Nate I know you like to pop off about stuff you know almost nothing about.”

No, only when I see people saying extremely ridiculous things like you so often do.

Svante: I would say heartlessness is more palpable in the denial of abundant and inexpensive energy. Migration would seem to be a much more minimal impact. And I would say the modern pattern where opportunities abound a whole lot more people are opting for individual migration away from the family farm than are opting for dramatically reducing their energy use.

And that doesn’t even consider the timing or uncertainty that surrounds this whole issue.

“NOAA just released updated tidal gauge data, showing a rise of 1.8 to 1.9mm per year. ”

The NOAA numbers you mention are correct, but your interpretation of them certainly is wrong.

I lack the time to process most recent tide gauge data, but please look at CSIRO’s numbers. Trends in mm/y.

1880-2013: 1.60

but

1993-2013: 3.56

The discussion actually is the inverse! All possible people doubt about the accuracy of tide gauge data and its processing, since that data shows a substantial rise increment of 0.36 mm/y wrt satellite data.

Tropical cyclone (TC) temperature and water vapor structures are essential atmospheric variables. In this study, global positioning system (GPS) radio occultation (RO) observations from the GPS RO mission named the Constellation Observing System for Meteorology, Ionosphere, and Climate and the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) Receiver for Atmospheric Sounding on board both MetOp-A and MetOp-B satellites over the 9-yr period from 2007 to 2015 are used to generate a set of composite structures of temperature and water vapor fields within tropical depressions (TDs), tropical storms (TSs), and hurricanes (HUs) over the Atlantic Ocean and TDs, TSs, and typhoons (TYs) over the western Pacific Ocean. . . .A limitation of the present study is an inability to resolve the TC inner-core structures because of a lack of sufficient RO profiles that collocate with TCs in their inner-core regions and the relatively coarse along-track resolutions of GPS RO data.

Having two super blooms in two years is highly unusual. In California, super blooms happen about once in a decade in a given area, and they have been occurring less frequently with the drought.
Top places to see the wildflower super bloom in Southern California in 2019.https://youtu.be/L5gJfFwvjkg

BC coastal communities has been told by the BC Provincial Government to be prepared for 1 – 2 meters sea level rise by 2100. My city’s downtown is on a river delta and land reclaimed from the sea. High tides are already a problem even without sea level rise … its going to cost billions to build a dike that will fail when the earthquake strikes.

Needless to say my complaints, that sea level rise is 1 – 2 mm per year and that there has never been 1 cm per year sea level rise over a century, have gone ignored.

I sure hope someone can get sanity to return before our civilization is destroyed by whoever it is that is feeding this crap to our governments in such a way as to preclude any sense and exercise of due diligence.

On the other hand … if the alarmists are right … maybe I can get an exclusive gondola concession.

It rather depends on where in BC you are. Some areas of the coast are still rising after the weight of the last glacial ice sheet was removed and are unlikely to be affected by sea level rise. Others are hardly moving and will be vulnerable.

Those studying the effect of temperature on Antarctic and Greenland ice are expecting a non-linear response as the coastal ice butressing the ice inland disappeara, with an acceleration of ice flow into the ocean as a consequence.

Roy, “Take No-one’s Word For Anything”: At last I have procured a laser/IR Temperature Reader. At c.35S now in early Autumn here in New Zealand, I find cooling as one rises to Zenith, often below 0C there in blue sky. Even right next to the Sun, which reads 170-260 when pointed at, possibly overloaded.
Clouds can be warmer than Blue sky and seem to read according to height – the droplets likely equate with the ambient T.
Nighttime: seems like readings behave similarly but no sun of course!

I cannot discern any “Downwelling Effect”, just the Adiabat. Would appreciate your opinion, Roy. Brett Keane, New Zealand

Brett, the angle makes a difference. If you point the device directly overhead, you will typically get the coldest readings. I have seen temperatures below -40 C (night time, clear sky). Clouds are warm. I once found a low cloud, on a summer day, at 35 C!

Well, according to the wiki article there is a laser beam. The particular one in the wiki article you referenced has an accuracy to about 20ft. So, again I ask how does it measure the temperature of a cloud?

They use a thermopyle, which essentially measures the temperature rise or fall of an IR absorbing layer, relative to the ambient temperature of the device, and thereby, the IR flux flowing into or out of the device.

From that flux, together with the measured ambient temperature, they use JD’s ‘bogus’ Radiative Heat Transfer (RHT) equation to find the temperature of the source.

Notice in figure 2. the RHT equation, the ‘bogus’ one, is shown being used.

Brett Keane, Your hand held IR thermometer can’t measure in the CO2 bands, else it’s readings of any surface would be distorted or blocked by the CO2 absorp_tion in the air between that surface and the instrument. That’s why your effort to point the thing toward the sky don’t indicate a CO2 downwelling.

Swanson: Based on your argument, actually even alone, downwelling IR is a misnomer. The hand held device if tuned to CO2 frequencies would not be measuring downwelling IR it would be measuring the temperature of the CO2 where the device is. Downwelling IR is a manufactured concept whose existence is purely created by the popular CO2 “insulation” theory, but with insulation if you measure the warm side of the insulation it isn’t conduction from the cool side that you are measuring. Control the language and you control the mind.

The laser is only the pointer. We have an old debate with Roy about the proper use of IR guns that use algorithms…..Brett
As I said, found no downwelling effect, only adiabat.
Also, there is an obvious, to me, vibrational KE effect on cloud steam water globules. You should see them dancing to that………. and all clouds are surrounded with up to two radii of unseen globule/WV soup. To me, Physics is just nature in action, as befits its meaning of Greek Physikos = Nature. People who toss formulae around need to forget there classrooms and work in the open air and sea. With a basic grounding in Mechanics, the real truth slowly comes. Took me too long, but at 71, it starts to sink in.

The 1st lesson of course is always be open to correction, which is why I ask Roy Spencer, whom I really respect. Good to see other inquiring minds here too……….

Brett,
I understand the laser is just a pointer. But that’s somewhat my point. I have one of those instruments too. I don’t really understand if you point to the sky what you are measuring? You are saying that you’re measuring downwelling readiation? Do you have a link to the old debate you had with Dr. Spencer?

stephen…”I understand the laser is just a pointer. But that’s somewhat my point. I have one of those instruments too. I don’t really understand if you point to the sky what you are measuring?”

You are measuring frequency, nothing more. Hand-held IR devices are calibrated in labs to convert a received frequency to a colour temperature. The units do not measure heat directly.

If you pointed a hand-held device at boiling water then turned around and pointed it at a block of ice, if the sensor was heat-dependent it would take it a long time to cool down to the temperature of ice.

The process happens instantaneously, however, indicating that the device responds to the frequency of EM not heat.

If you had a thermometer that could be immersed in boiling water, then immersed in ice, the mercury would drop rapidly in the vial but not instantaneously. A hand-held IR device responds to temperature difference instantaneously.

“And if you STILL dont see how this demonstrates the greenhouse effect, imagine what would happen if you suddenly removed all of that atmosphere and clouds: there would be a sudden increase in the rate of net IR flow from the surface of the Earth to outer space, and temperatures would drop. THAT is the greenhouse effect.”

There is a problem. Removing the atmosphere would allow the full sunlight to reach the instrument. The temperature would rise. When the Sun’s radiation is blocked even more – during a solar eclipse, for example, the temperature drops. Increasing the amount of atmosphere obviously has the same effect – less energy reaches the surface.

No use talking about night time – the temperature falls. No global warming at night. No “Hottest year EVAH!”

The Berkeley Earth method handles discontinuities without human bias. They get similar results to everyone else. They found that the urban heat island effect is the opposite of what Salby says. Papers here:https://tinyurl.com/yywd4okj

Salby thinks the human CO2 contribution is small, but nowadays you can see CO2 sources and sinks from space, down to point sources, see 2015-207 average in fig.2 here:https://tinyurl.com/y9dhm6uq

The question was, can a diffuse gas concentrate in spots? The answer is unquestionably yes.

The flows are quite complicated, and where it will pool up in greater amounts is determined by many variables, including ground topology, wind patterns, and biological activity. Natural source activity spread across the entire globe can easily outweigh the input of slivers of industrial activity.

He talks about the difficulty of modeling the flows at about 16 minutes in (but, beware – these video frames contain model results, not actual measurements). Note particularly his chart of photosynthesis activity at about an hour in. Then, look at the measurements of CO2 – the active regions lie right on top of each other.

Industrial activity tends to occur in places where there is high biological activity, because those are naturally the most comfortable environments for living things, including humans and their machines. But, the coast of Western Africa is not generally considered a hotbed of industrial activity. Yet, its CO2 concentration is high. So is its photosynthesis signature.

If you look for something with an answer already in mind, and you focus on those indicators which are consistent with that answer, you may think you have proven it true. That is how confirmation bias works. Scientists must be very careful of falling into that trap. The satellite images are consistent with alternative explanations.

The question was, can a diffuse gas concentrate in spots? The answer is unquestionably yes.

No, it came from higher concentration, then dissipated to lower.

The flows are quite complicated, and where it will pool up in greater amounts is determined by many variables, including ground topology, wind patterns, and biological activity. Natural source activity spread across the entire globe can easily outweigh the input of slivers of industrial activity.

That’s right, but high concentration means a source, low is a sink.

He talks about the difficulty of modeling the flows at about 16 minutes in (but, beware – these video frames contain model results, not actual measurements). Note particularly his chart of photosynthesis activity at about an hour in. Then, look at the measurements of CO2 – the active regions lie right on top of each other.

That’s right, but we know that photosynthesis is a sink.

Industrial activity tends to occur in places where there is high biological activity, because those are naturally the most comfortable environments for living things, including humans and their machines. But, the coast of Western Africa is not generally considered a hotbed of industrial activity. Yet, its CO2 concentration is high. So is its photosynthesis signature.

That’s right, but photosynthesis is a sink. This is consistent with deforestation and seasonal biomass burning.

If you look for something with an answer already in mind, and you focus on those indicators which are consistent with that answer, you may think you have proven it true. That is how confirmation bias works. Scientists must be very careful of falling into that trap. The satellite images are consistent with alternative explanations.

If you zoom in further you can attribute it to individual power plants, cities etc. There are papers that does that.
Here’s another example (find more on Google Scholar):https://tinyurl.com/y3lygr49

You need a long term average of course, because the natural flows are big.

For some time now you see highly ‘scientific’ head posts here and there claiming that tide gauges data processed by the CSIRO show, for the time period of coexistence with satellite altimetry, an acceleration of sea level that is allegedly inexistent in the satellite record.

Moreover, it is regularly claimed that the tide gauge data shows an acceleration only during the satellite era (since 1993).

Particularly noteworthy was a contribution from Eschenbach in WUWT, in which he ranted as aggressively as unqualified against the CSIRO data.

I had downloaded and processed both datasets two years ago (CSIRO for 1993-2013 at that time), and was quite surprised about his ‘results’.

*
Firstly, it is strange to pretend that the trend in satellite readings is constant over time. You just need to download the data, e.g. from

“The Earth is constantly changing shape. To be understood in context, when the motion of the Earth’s crust is observed, it must be referenced. A Terrestrial Reference frame provides a set of coordinates of some points located on the Earth’s surface. It can be used to measure plate tectonics, regional subsidence or loading .. . ”

barry says:
March 15, 2019 at 9:45 AM
“Accurately plot the trajectory of a probe to orbit Jupiter? Ridiculous!”

They don’t calculate it as one trajectory. Probes to Jupiter make several adjustments during the journey.

This entire post is about accurately measuring altitudes from space and the sort of interference that occurs in doing that. Only science moron’s believe that if you find 65 different answers the correct answer is the mean of all the possible answers.

The ‘no AGW’ meme sure is persistent. It’s only surprising that people take it seriously in this day and age.

I see AGW deniers in the same category as 9/11 truthers, intelligent designers, HIV-connection deniers, moon landing hoaxers and flat Earthers. They all cherry-pick the science (or make it up) to prop up a preconceived opinion.

How long before this kind of stupidity is relegated to the 1%?

About the same time that 1% of North Americans believe alien abductions actually happen…..

– 3:10 He says growth is 3x faster. No, he shows the growth rate increase. It’s a small change year on year on the addition to a large reservoar, halved by sinks.
– 3:45 He says “exactly the same”. Look, that line is done with a ruler, it’s hitting the troffs on the left. The whole curve is bending up, it is not exactly 2.1 ppmv/yr.
– He has a myopic view, the problem is long term. Short term is natural, long term is anthropogenic. He uses the former to determine the latter.
– This is the longterm: https://tinyurl.com/y8kyzwsk
– 4:05 “Fossil fuel emissions increased by a factor of 300%”. No, the derivative did.
– 7:18 FFE resembles the trend line. Read ref. 1.
– Confuses growth rate and growth rate increase again.
– The handdrawn ruler line again. Comparison of derivative and a large reservoar, the former will not be clearly visible in the latter.
– 9:17 Another handdrawn line, not true anymore.
– 9:20 Scarce observations. No, we have global coverage now, see my other video comment.
– 12:51 Cause and effect reversed, ruins the analysis that follow.
– 15:33 Close to zero. No, fossil fuel was, land use was not.
– 21:40 Alpha is not the net, the net lasts for millenia:
– https://tinyurl.com/yb65bxkq
– 30:00 Again, this is a measure of the turnaround, not the net.
– The following math is based on this rotten foundation.
– 41:50 In effect, he proves that natural emissions match population growth!
– 47:30 He contradicts himself, emissions are natural, but follows population growth.
– 56:20 This is the surface budget fallacy, the effect is set at the TOA.
– 58:00 Not 0.2, it’s about one degree, try modtran.
– 1:04 Ignores other forcings, for example there might have been less aerosols during the depression, and more during WWII.
– The other video cited C. Le Quere et al. 2013. End year still not updated in this video.
– Read the 2018 version (ref. 1) and see fig.4. The budget imbalance goes from +2 to -2 Gt where he has his rate change. Emissions level off again in 2015.
– https://tinyurl.com/y634nevx

Yes I think it demonstrates gross differences in the amount of down welling IR. I don’t think it is accurately measuring anything. After reading Dan Pangburn’s explanations, ideas, theories, etc., Dr Spencer’s ideas, Murry Salby I have come to the conclusion that the greenhouse effect is real but that the contribution from CO2 is very small, almost insignificant. Also, most of the CO2 increase has been due to natural emission, about 30% due to fossil fuel. Also, I believe CO2 follows temperature and not the other way around. I don’t agree with Dr. Spencer that most of the warming has been caused by humans. I believe most of the warming has been natural. I believe the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere will level off way below where alarmists believe according to Salby. Also, according to Salby temperature should continue to increase because it is in an uptrend but it will be due to natural causes and will not follow any of the IPCC models. CO2 will continue to lag temperature.

E-man,
I’ll take a look at this and give it a better look than you gave Salby’s work. Refute his math. That’s what I want to see. I’ve seen several critiques of Salby but none have refuted his math. Math is irrefutable.

E-man,
That’s a really bad critique of Salby’s work. First he pokes fun at him for misstating the current level of CO2. Has he really ever done a presentation in front of people? I have done many and will misstate something-have you? Second, he pokes fun at Salby for stating CO2’s temperature dependence then criticizes Salby because CO2 is apparently not following temperature and that neither is displaying a dependence. Does he realize he has just shot a big hole in AGW theory? Also, it is obvious he really hasn’t listened to Salby. Salby categorically states that CO2 lags temperature-not by 800 years like ice proxy data claims but by a few to several decades. You really need to do better than Cook.

E-man believes: “The existance and strength of the CO2 GHE is ca!culated mathematically, confirmed by laboratory experiment,by radiation spectra of outward and downwelling radiation and by energy budgets.”

E-man all of that nonsense has been diligently debunked. If you haven’t seen the debunking, or have closed your eyes to it, feel free to present your strongest evidence here. Many of us love to squash pseudoscience.

E-man’s italicized statement to me is a denial of real science. You just have to ask him one question: Then why can’t anyone create a model that forecasts temperature? I think about 110 models have been created. Not one has any predictive value. Also, I’d really like to explore this quantum theory is the underpinning of GHE with him. I’d like to see the math.

CO2 is in both a feedback and forcing relationship with the temperature. It responds to a temperature change and it catalyzes temperature changes. If some other catalyzing agent causes the initial temperature change then CO2 will appear to lag the temperature change despite it providing most of the later forcing in many cases once the initial catalyzing agent goes dormant. But, if a substantial and sudden pulse of CO2 were to occur then it would be the initial catalyzing agent itself and thus lead the temperature change. As Shaken et. al. reported it is often the case that both happen with CO2 leading in the NH and lagging in the SH.

Complete nonsense. As even the IPCC admits, ” . . . the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.”

You might be unaware that a chaotic system produces completely different outcomes given identical inputs. Once again, from the IPCC “In climate research and modelling, we should recognise that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, . . .”

Sad but true. At least the IPCC seems to grudgingly accept reality in this regard, unlike yourself.

A forcing is an externally driven change intheclimate system which causes a change in global temperature.

A feedback is an internal response by the climate system which amplifies or damps out forcing.

The white swan is “CO2 follows temperature” and in many cases it is correct.

For example, at thestart of the Holocene changes in thEarth’s orbit increased the amount of radiation reaching the high Northern latitudes. This was the equivalent of 1.2C warming.
This produced a feedback. CO2 released from permafrost and the ocean raised levels from 200ppm to 28ppm. This produced additional warming of 3.8C. hence the total warming of 5C. In this case temperature is the forcing and CO2 is the feedback.

I’m quite happy to agree with Salby on early Holocene warming , though you probably do not.

BUT. The black swans are Snowball Earths, the Permean extinction, the PETM and the 20th century. In all these cases a change in CO2 was the forcing and temperature was the feedback.

Salby and sceptics ignore these examples, which render his case invalid.

E-man, topics like ice ages, snowball Earth, and PETM are all in the category of “soft science”. Soft science is too often a mix of actual science and “consensus”. And consensus is too often affected by hidden agenda–quest for funding, personal (religious and political) beliefs, etc. Just in the last 50 years there have been numerous changes in the “consensus”, as different groups try to guess at the past. A good example is the theory about how the Moon got here. There are currently at least 4 different guesses, but none hold up.

“Soft science” is easily corrupted, and then becomes “pseudoscience”. It’s “pseudoscience” when the established laws of physics are broken.

“Hard science” is predictable, repeatable, demonstrable, and verifiable. Often the “laws” have valid proofs and a long history of empirical support. To qualify as a “law”, there cannot be even ONE “black swan”.

AGW is most definitely “soft science”. It is driven by agendas. The “hard science” of AGW is Earth’s energy budget, involving radiative heat transfer, and thermodynamics. The energy budget foisted by the IPCC and Institutionalized Pseudoscience, is blatant pseudoscience.

That’s why I asked you for the “strongest evidence” you have for AGW/GHE. You didn’t actually answer my request, but if you did it would be with links to “soft-science papers”. There is NO hard-science proving AGW/GHE.

A forcing is an externally driven change in the climate system which causes a change in global temperature.

A feedback is an internal response by the climate system which amplifies or damps out forcing.”

Of course, this is nonsensical garbage. Climatological jargon, with no relation to reality. The surface gets hotter when exposed to more sunlight, cools when exposed to less. No need for science jargon of the climatological variety at all.

Waffling on about black swans just shows how badly EM’s mad suppositions lack sound scientific support. The exception does not prove the rule – otherwise it is not a rule at all.

In spite of four and a half billion years of sunlight, and as many swans of various colours you wish to involve, the surface has definitely cooled. Maybe EM and his pack of bumbling buffoons ascribe the cooling to a very, very large Black Swan? The exceptionally gullible members of the pseudoscientific climatological community will believe anything, by the look of things.

They are probably thick enough to believe that Gavin Schmidt is a world renowned climate scientist, (rather than an undistinguished mathematician), or that Michael Mann is a Nobel Prize winner!

Still no miraculous heating properties for CO2. Still no testable GHE hypothesis involving CO2.

“There is an asymmetry, CO2 affects the strongest output frequencies, the bulk of the input is unaffected.”

More meaningless climatological nonsensical jargon.

The surface cools at night, in the absence of sunlight. So much for asymmetrical heating, or similar nonsense. Likewise, the earth has cooled for four and a half billion years. A testable GHE hypothesis would need to include these facts – which is probably why there isn’t one.

None of what you said has anything to do with “. . .evidence you have for AGW/GHE.”, does it?

Just more obscurantist waffling about irrelevancies.

Obviously, increasing the amount of CO2 between a thermometer and a heat source reduces the amount of energy reaching the thermometer, thus lowering the temperature. As Tyndall found, some gases are so effective at this that even additionally interposing a brass plate between the heat source and the thermometer made no further reduction to the radiation being allowed through.

All your implications that additional CO2 will result in the surface becoming hotter are rubbish.

You have provided evidence of your scientific illiteracy, but little else.

My point is the planet and the ocean are net emitters of CO2. To obscure that fact by quoting Henry’s Law of partial pressures is trying to obfuscate the point. Henry’s Law states that the amount of a gas in a liquid will be in proportion to its partial pressure. As the temperature of the planet and ocean warm gases will be less soluble in the ocean. The gases in the ocean will also be in equilibrium with the gases in the atmosphere. According to Henry’s Law the concentration of the gases in the ocean will be in proportion to their partial pressures in the atmosphere.

Mike,, The observation that CO2, in spite of being a ghg as demonstrated in the lab, has little, if any, effect on climate actually depends on a phenomenon (thermalization) which contributes to the GHE effect.

“Never have we so hurt and mistreated our common home as we have in the last two hundred years. Yet we are called to be instruments of God our Father, so that our planet might be what he desired when he created it and correspond with his plan for peace, beauty and fullness.”

“A greenhouse gas is a gas that absorbs and emits radiant energy within the thermal infrared range.”

Unfortunately, this definition applies to all gases. All gases can be warmed, all gases can cool.

Wikipedia fosters nonsense, albeit unwittingly, I suppose –

“The balance between absorbed and emitted infrared radiation has a critical effect on Earth’s climate.” sounds very sciency, but is completely devoid of information.

The definition of a GHG is meaningless. Demonstrating in a laboratory that gases (all) can be warmed by interacting with radiation, and will cool by emitting radiation (infrared of course, if below temperatures which result in visible light) if allowed to do so, has no particular relation to any particular gas.

Likewise, thermalisation sounds sciency, but imparts no nformation. From Wikipedia again –

“In physics, thermalization (in Commonwealth English thermalisation) is the process of physical bodies reaching thermal equilibrium through mutual interaction. In general the natural tendency of a system is towards a state of equipartition of energy and uniform temperature that maximizes the system’s entropy. Thermalization, thermal equilibrium, and temperature are therefore important fundamental concepts within statistical physics, statistical mechanics, and thermodynamics; all of which are a basis for many other specific fields of scientific understanding and engineering application.”

No mention of GHGs, climate, GHE or anything similar. Good luck with trying to come up with a testable GHE hypothesis involving GHGs and thermalisation. CO2 heats nothing. The GHE is specious pseudoscientific nonsense.

Would it be better for more or less infrared radiation to be absorbed? What would be the quantifiable effect of a bigger balance be? You haven’t really got a clue, have you?

You might as well not understand “this stuff”, if you can’t even come up with any useful results from your “understanding”. Maybe you could tell me why a thermometer should respond to reduced radiation by becoming hotter? I tend to think that thermometers respond positively to increased temperatures, but your “understanding” may well be superior to mine.

Or maybe you can’t actually express your “understanding” in scientific terms. Just like pseudoscientific climatologists, perhaps?

It is not the opposite of Salby’s hypothesis, it is part and parcel of it. No matter the source of excess CO2, both surface oceans and atmosphere will see an increase.

Furthermore, on an historical timescale, the carbon cycle is not closed. From the surface system, there is continuous input from the depths of the oceans, which is in long term circulation, and continuous output back to those depths. Any change to the dynamics of that circulation results in long term trends in the surface system.

Given the earlier correspondence, I have to try and type in the word ‘radiative’ to see what happens.
Here goes: radiative
Perhaps Radiative
Maybe upper case: RADIATIVE
radiative
Let’s see what happens with another, related, word:
radiation

I’ve checked the NOAA.gov web for tidal gauge trend history and can’t find one port in the US which shows acceleration since early 1900’s. . There are linear trend differences based on differences in subsidence, but no acceleration for any single port. If that is the case, how can there be any acceleration on the average curve? Doesn’t make sense.

Binidon – Mark E commented:
‘I’ve checked the NOAA.gov web for tidal gauge trend history and can’t find one port in the US which shows acceleration since early 1900’s. There are linear trend differences based on differences in subsidence, but no acceleration for any single port. If that is the case, how can there be any acceleration on the average curve? Doesn’t make sense.’
Your reply was that this ‘isn’t global.’
Both comments seem reasonable enough.
However, looking at it all from a practical point of view, if no port in the US shows acceleration since the early 1900s – who cares about all the scary stories?
The alleged sea level rises about which so much argument takes places don’t in reality make a scrap of difference to our lives.
We’re talking about measurement claims for global sea level changes to within a fraction of a millimetre – nonsense in the real world.
Where on the planet is there a port where millimetre changes in water level have made any difference whatsoever?

EM – leaving aside the shock-horror climate change picture of a raging sea (what a surprise), it says this in the article:
‘Sea levels are rising everywhere, but Norfolk has it worse. The land, pushed up by glaciers to the north thousands of years ago, is now sinking as much as an inch-and-a-half per decade. Scientists also believe that a slowing Gulf Stream is causing seas to rise faster along the Mid-Atlantic coast.’
A far more realistic cause based on real-world observation than attributing any changes to a few molecules extra of CO2 in the atmosphere, don’t you think?

Secondly, you seem to ignore or understimate the problem of people whose job is to care about things like sea level: insurances, and above all reinsurances.

By accident, I had some years ago the opportunity to meet a woman working in a big reinsurance company, where she led a project for climate-related insurance and reinsurance cost increases.

I was surprised to detect that she didn’t rely so much on IPCC blah blah, but did rather on scientific publications, e.g. – yes yes – that of Church & White (2011) , what she digested by far deeper as I would ever be able to: she had a terrifying staistics and math knowledge.

Such people, Carbon500, care quite a lot about what changes around us.

Simply because their estimates about all that influe on their companies’ strategy for the two or three decades coming.

Binidon: coastal changes are nothing new. Take for example some of the UK’s coastline:https://urbanrim.org.uk/hotspots.htm
If you read the above, it’s an interesting factual account of changes in the county of Yorkshire, and the supposed ‘climate change’ beloved of the scaremongers has got nothing to do with it.
It seems that everywhere you look these days, it’s due to ‘climate change’ – absolute nonsense. Look for recognised causes of changes in sea level before invoking the nebulous notion of ‘climate change.’
The Earth isn’t static, and never has been.

“Furthermore, on an historical timescale, the carbon cycle is not closed. From the surface system, there is continuous input from the depths of the oceans, which is in long term circulation, and continuous output back to those depths. Any change to the dynamics of that circulation results in long term trends in the surface system.”

By the way I’ve just started reading “Physics of the Atmosphere and Climate”,2012. You can order it from Amazon. The guy is no intellectual lightweight. You’re going to have trouble trying to refute his math. I’ve watched about a half dozen of his presentations. He covers your question in one of them. It might take me a couple days to find maybe.

That shows you do not know Salby’s argument at all. The argument is that the rate of change of atmospheric CO2 is proportional to appropriately baselined temperature. Whether temperature anomaly is increasing or decreasing, if it is above the baseline, CO2 is increasing. Only when temperature anomaly declines below the baseline does CO2 start decreasing.

Yes, I agree completely with what you just said. Not sure what I don’t understand. I’m sure there are things I still don’t understand. I just received his textbook and started reading. It will take me more time to understand it all. Fascinating subject. But atmospheric CO2 is conserved. I don’t see why that is controversial.

Start watching at time 9:30. CO2 evolution obeys the time integral of temperature. CO2 lags temperature by a quater cycle. If he is correct and temperature has leveled we should see CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere start to slow. Be interesting to see this June’s CO2 level.

And, it has. Since the onset of the “pause”, CO2 concentration has been rising essentially linearly, whereas during the time temperature was rising steadily, it was increasing more or less quadratically.

During the time it has been increasing approximately linearly (roughly constant rate of change), emissions have been accelerating:

Salby doesn’t talk about solubility-that was my interpretation. He talks about observation and that CO2 emission is going up at northern lattitudes-field measurements. He focuses on the law of conservation and the atmospheric CO2 budget and observed data. My answer not Salby’s would be because of Henry’s Law. The partial pressure of CO2 is going up although ever so slightly so it should be in equilibrium in the liquid phase in proportion to the partial pressure in the gas phase. Increasing CO2 in the atmosphere should lower ocean pH very little because it is buffered by bicarbonate in the sea water. Carbonic acid is a weak acid.

If my above statement wasn’t true ocean life would have been dead long ago when CO2 was 3000ppm. The Earth can handle a lot higher levels of CO2 and plants would relish it. I believe CO2 in the 1000-2000ppm range would be optimum.

These are equilibrium reactions. When conditions favour the uptake of CO2 by the ocean the equilibrium shifts towards carbonate and hydrogen. This allows the oceans to store more CO2, but decreases the pH.

When conditions favour release of CO2 into the atmosphere the equilibrium shifts back towards CO2. H+ ions are recombined into water molecules and pH increases.

You’re thinking is a little one dimensional. Natural waters are alkaline solutions including seawater. When CO2 increases in the water it is in equilibrium with bicarbonate. Carbonic acid has a pretty high pKa. Both the CO2 and bicarbonate would be increasing but the Ka is small so the pH would change little. It has been awhile since I’ve had Chemistry 101 but I think I’m correct.

pH is negative log H+ concentration, a change of 1pH unit is a tenfold change in H+ concentration. Ocean pH has decreased from 8.2 to 8.1. To a first approximation that is an increase in H+ concentration of 10% and a dissolved CO2 increase between 5% and 10%.

Your box is permeable above and below.

At the top of the atmosphere photodissociation of H2O is producing a steady stream of H+ ions into space which will strip Earth of its water in another billion years or so.

The bottom of the box is permeable. Subduction is removing CO2 from ocean floor sediments into the mantle, and part of it recycles back into the atmosphere through volcanoes.

There is also fossil carbon removed from the atmosphere and stored as coal, oil, methane clathrates and peat. Do you regard them as inside the box or outside the box?

Yes,
I believe the CO2 concentration in the ocean has increased 5 to 10%, no argument. Do I believe the pH has dropped from 8.2 to 8.1? No. Has it dropped some. Yes. However much it drops nature can handle it like it has for billions of years.

You see the Earth’s not a closed system because it’s losing 0.0000000000001% of its H+ ions every million years. And, in a billion years the Earth is going to lose all its water. That’s your argument. Because if it was a closed system Salby would be correct. Right? You pretend you’re serious. You’re just a leftist. Both you and Svante. Two leftists.

Let me restate that. Has the concentration of CO2 in the ocean gone up? Yes. How much? 5-10% I don’t know probably the top inch. It is a big ocean and will take probably thousands of years to equilibrate for even small changes. Has the pH of the ocean dropped from 8.2 to 8.1? Definitely not.

I did. It is just like the temperature record. You have large short term variations on top of a small yearly increase. The green wiggles are mainly due to the ENSO. If he had bothered to put a trend line through them he would have a measure of the our contribution.

He uses these short term variations to determine our long term contribution.

B) Maybe it was, and maybe it wasn’t. Only the ice core proxies say it was, and there is no way of validating them. They disagree with other proxies.

C) Regime changes occur with complex, nonlinear systems. Perhaps we are simply in a different operating regime now.

It is all moot. We do not need to speculate on what may have come before. Within the modern era, since reliable and direct measurements became available, it is clear that temperatures are driving the rise in CO2.

Come on, Svante. Even if the researchers were not influenced by a desire to mesh with the narrative (remember Millikan’s oil drop experiment?*), these error bars are huge, rendering the results virtually meaningless.

It does not matter. Within the modern era, since reliable and direct measurements became available, it is clear that temperatures are driving the rise in CO2. These are real, direct measurements – not proxies. It leaves no room for doubt.

*http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm

We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. Its a little bit off, because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. Its interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of the electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bigger than Millikans, and the next ones a little bit bigger than that, and the next ones a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.

Why didnt they discover that the new number was higher right away? Its a thing that scientists are ashamed ofthis historybecause its apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikans, they thought something must be wrongand they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number closer to Millikans value they didnt look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that. Weve learned those tricks nowadays, and now we dont have that kind of a disease.

‘Within the modern era, since reliable and direct measurements became available, it is clear that temperatures are driving the rise in CO2. These are real, direct measurements not proxies. It leaves no room for doubt.’

‘So, your stated opinion is that temperature is irrelevant to flows of carbon dioxide’

Oh, is that what I said? Nope.

I’ve said many times that there are various sources and sinks for carbon on Earth, some of which are temperature-dependent and governed by Henry’s law.

Henry’s law makes it abundantly clear that a 40% rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration driven by a temperature rise of ~ 1K is impossible.

The short-term variation of atmospheric CO2 concentration is highly correlated to ENSO.

For you, this correlation ought to ‘leave no doubt’ that ENSO is driving CO2.

But, in addition, the causal mechanisms have been identified and CORROBORATED by carbon flux measurements. And they involve the terrestrial biosphere in regions whose weather patterns are strongly modulated by ENSO.

Short term correlation, explained above. This mechanism, ENSO, does not act on long time scales.

Long term we have 3 quantities show a rising trend. CO2 concentration, emissions, and temperature. Many other unrelated quantities have rising trends over this period. Hardly a ‘tight correlation’

How would you determine what are the causal relationships, if any?

We can identify highly plausible mechanism that gives a causal link from emissions to concentration, and from concentration to temperature.

For emissions to concentration an approximate QUANTITATIVE relationship is predicted, and observed. We have many additional lines of corroborating evidence in ice cores, ocean concentration, sediments, CO2 fluxes, isotopes, etc.

This evidence should not be simply ignored.

Given all this, there is a huge chasm between a declared ‘tight’ correlation between temperature and CO2 rise, and ‘no room for doubt’ of a causal relationship between them.

Be careful about jumping the gun on ocean ph proxies for CO2. Some good validation exists for the ice core record in terms of direction of variation but there never was much question about that. The question has always been with ice core proxies as to whether the ice core proxies provide a good quantification of the amount of CO2 in ancient ice. The charts show the jury is still out of quantification with the boron proxies showing considerably wider range in CO2 variation than the ice cores. However just a glance at the data suggests they have a lot more work to do before one can really compare whether those differences hold up.

This warning is especially for you Nate as the data as it sits is looking pretty inconvenient for you and very positive to the idea that both CO2 has varied more in the past than suggested by ice core data and that it has been driven by climate because the most recent boron proxies don’t approach the co2 levels in the previous interglacial.

One should actually read the data before extrapolating what a statement actually means when a proxy says it shows consistency with a previous proxy. The issue is not that ice cores are not a proxy for CO2 or not the issue is whether ice cores preserve all the information about CO2 in the atmosphere. Its not a case that a proxy is a proxy.

Nate the study does not conclude ice cores have bad quantification. The study is attempting to validate the boron isotopes as a valid proxy for CO2 by demonstrating a statistical correlation to the ice core proxy.

But neither the ice core CO2 proxy nor the boron isotope CO2 proxy have validated maximum annual, decadal, centennial, or even millennial levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. The proxies show residuals averaged over many millenia and thus do not even show that the Holocene has unusual levels of CO2 which we know to be the case by direct measurement.

The second pair of charts show a plotting of CO2 over the past 800,000 years. The icecore proxy shows the holocene and eemian peaking at around 280ppm (with no range of deviations provided). The boron proxy in attempt to relate it to ice core data shows samples considerably higher for both the holocene and eemian. In fact the chart cuts off the top of the proxy range during the eemian at about 360ppm (though chart lists “pco2 uatm” which equals ppm.

The boron isotope range of probabilities (i assume 2std) shows the eemian with 340ppm. But all this has to be taken with a grain of salt because these are long period proxies and short bursts of CO2 (like a single 100 or 200 year increase) may not be preserved in the data.

This problem is ubiquitous in climate science when looking over long periods of time and its an easy sell to the gullible that the proxies preserve all the necessary data to arrive at a conclusion. In this case the boron proxies are stretching the range of CO2 variation as can clearly be seen in the data.

Nate I don’t think anybody has suggested mankind has not emitted CO2. Nor has anybody suggested to my knowledge that CO2 was not low coming out of the LIA. You challenged the idea that CO2 is driven by temperature instead of the other way around by suggesting multiple proxies say otherwise.

I merely pointed out that new proxies are suggesting more temperature forcing on CO2 content in the atmosphere, not less. We know that anthropogenic emissions did not cause the high levels of CO2 being seen in new proxies. There is a question as to whether anthropogenic emissions are making the lionshare of the seen increase or not. I know scientists like to pontificate, my response is show me the evidence. 40 years of watching scientists with clients with agendas pontificate and game the system suggests everybody should thoroughly understand the evidence instead of just believing. Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me. Problem is so many folks haven’t noticed being fooled the first time.

Nate says: “The papers show that over the last 1000 y, CO2, measured with 10-20 y time resolution, showed no excursions more than 10 ppm, away from the ~ 280 ppm mean until the 20th century.”

We are swimming in circles here Nate.

You are talking about the unvalidated ice core papers only. Your argument was this evidence has been validated. However, one cannot find anywhere in these new proxies where the claim made in the ice core papers of very small variation has been validated. One cannot validate the ice core proxy with an ice core proxy and its a falsehood that the variation in ice core proxies have been validated by the new proxies when if anything the exact opposite is true. . . .except that is merely a conclusion looking at the data and it appears that the new proxy validation process has gone dark. Which in the world of single funder science is the prima facie evidence that the powers to be in science don’t want to explore that.

Which of any of your points argues that CO2 during the peak of the Eemian did not exceed 280ppm CO2?

Its easy to pretend you know what you are talking about throwing around a bunch of fancy papers claiming validation but if you are going to validate anything its usually a good idea to offer up something from the relevant period. You keep throwing out generically “isotope” proxies but the only one I have seen throws a large bucket of water on the concept that CO2 was constrained below 350ppm during the Eemian.

There is more uncertainty here. Ive not looked into it. But sounds like Boron has issues.

I reiterate that last 1000 y offers compelling evidence, from high res CO2 levels that they are not responding to temperature.

And strong evidence thaT C13 levels are flat for 900y, then change dramatically in last 100 y. This is well understood to be a fingerprint of Anthro carbon accumulating in the atmosphere. And tree rings, with 1 y time resolution, corroborate these changes.

If you want to dismiss these data as not validated, or not hard evidence, then it is on you to show why.

Nate says:
March 28, 2019 at 5:34 AM
“‘Eemian?’ Nice job moving goal posts, Bill. The last 1000 y is sufficient, given the temp changes during that period, to establish that temperature is NOT the driver of the 100 ppm change.”

Move the goal posts? Nonsense!

I entered into this thread when you started throwing insults:

“https://tinyurl.com/yddoqte8
Nate says:
March 21, 2019 at 12:30 PM
Svante, thats a good proxy. Sea sediment proxies have been validated, and agree with ice cores. Not sure what proxies Bart is talking about. For him, inconvenient data is always Moot.”

And stated that the boron proxies don’t validate the icecore variations and in fact question whether the icecore data preserves the entire range of CO2 variation. This problem is not limited to the Eemian but it is the most pronounced in the Eemian.

You just plow ahead and keep using icecore proxies to validate icecore proxies as all 3 of your references come from ice cores.
Icecores have never been validated as to retaining the full range of atmospheric CO2 they are merely a presumably good proxy for whether CO2 was increasing or decreasing during various periods of time. You are so inculcated into the religion you can’t see that problem.

This may seem insulting, but it is factual. Bart often dismisses data without a valid reason, that we show him that doesnt fit his narrative.

And clearly you have that tendency as well.

‘You challenged the idea that CO2 is driven by temperature instead of the other way around by suggesting multiple proxies say otherwise.’

Exactly what this thread was about. Bart claims that specifically in the last 100 y, CO2 variation is being driven by temperature.

Why do both of you ignore the inconvenient C13 data of the last 1000 y, in air, in ice cores, in tree rings, that is entirely inconsistent with non-Anthro origins of the large jump in CO2 in the last 100 y?

This and the lack of variation in the validated 1000 y record, are hard evidence that squashes Bart’s claims. And this is only one piece out of many.

Yes, the jury is still out on the Eemian period, as is often the case as we go further back in time.

Thats ok, IMO, to have uncertainty about the distant past. True for many established ideas in science, geology and biology–they get more certain over time.

Well we have plenty of ice to work with but have a major deficiency in accurate CO2 atmosphere measurements. Even with Moana Loa a 60 year record in the tropics doesn’t give much confidence of polar CO2 levels that can several percentage points different.

How long does it take to fizz out? We would expect low levels of CO2 100 years ago since it has been warming for 100 years.

A few percentage points of inaccuracy over 100 years needs to be increased by an order of magnitude to get to an equivalent climate to today a thousand years ago.

Say you have 3% gas loss per 100 years. That extrapolates to 30% over the entire period the ice held more CO2 than the atmosphere. That would inconveniently convert 400ppm into 280ppm in a 1000 years.

Not saying thats the case but what if it was 380ppm? Allow for the 5% anthropogenic we can measure in the sky today. Way too many bandages on the theory, like the full sink theory.

IMO, we don’t have adequate data to have any hope of really bracketing this in a way that leads to high confidence. thats the case pretty much all the way across the board in climate science. Plenty of good science, well thought out and consistent theories, a lack of validating proxies (without cherry picking), but hey dude the Ptolemy Theory fits that description beautifully.

These are the kind of questions the folks in that field appear, from their papers, to work very hard to figure out, through measurements and modeling. Certainly the diffusion rate of gases in ice under high pressure could be measured in a lab.

Nate says:
March 29, 2019 at 9:08 PM
“These are the kind of questions the folks in that field appear, from their papers, to work very hard to figure out, through measurements and modeling. Certainly the diffusion rate of gases in ice under high pressure could be measured in a lab.”

I am sure, especially when they can get funded. But thats kind of like trying to get Lonnie Thompson to write a paper on the comings and goings of ice on Qori Kalis glacier post 2007 after predicting the glacier might be gone by 2012 or 13. Ain’t a gonna happen.

Maybe you guys can help me figure out what he is doing. At 1:04:00 he presents a slide of what his model predicts from 1980 to 2012. I can’t figure out how he drew the blue dotted line though. I’ve tried various different ways of “integrating the temperature” using both the Berkeley Earth and UAH datasets and I’ve tried various sensitivity parameters and I just don’t see how he is doing it.

However, from the slide at around 0:11:00 it looks like we can estimate the sensitivity parameter. Assuming I’m understanding his model it looks like it is around 150 ppmCO2/K. But what strikes me odd is that his model appears to treat the sensitivity parameter as if it were static and independent of the actual temperature. This seems to work okay for post 1960 data, but produces confusing and unrealistic results different periods of time in the paleoclimate record.

Also, it seems like he’s attributing all (or most anyway) of the atmospheric CO2 increase to “native emissions”. Where did all of that anthroprogenic CO2 go if it didn’t go into the atmosphere? And what is the source of this “native emissions”?

He used satellite data. So, it’d be the difference in temperature added to the temperature scaled to that plot. Also, by native I assume he means natural. The anthropogenic CO2 is there but he is saying it is so small it is undetectible even after 2002. The source of the natural emissions is the Earth’s surface.

As far as your question about sensitivity, I don’t know. I have a lot of questions too. I wish there was a place you could submit questions to him. I guess he got harassed so much he has stayed secluded.

I tried that in Excel with the monthly data. The fit between predicted and observed is not as good as what Salby shows. And to do it I had to use a sensitivity parameter of about 0.32 pCO2 per K on the monthly data. But that had to be specifically tuned for the 1980 to 2012 period. Different periods require tuning the sensitivity parameter differently. And even then the fit is loose. And if I run the model forward and backward beyond 1980 and 2012 then it starts diverging even more.

What we need is for Salby to publish the details of his model so that we can try and reproduce it and back test it over various time periods.

Yeah, that’s what I’ve been doing. For example, if I do the integral over the trivial endpoint to endpoint for the post 1960 data then I get 150 ppm/yr/K which produces reasonable results at least with that time period. But if I do 150/12 ppm/month/K and try to apply that sensitivity parameter to the monthly data all hell breaks loose. When working with the monthly data 0.32 ppm/month/K seemed to produce reasonable results at least for the period in question. I’m also struggling with figuring out what that appropriate baseline temperature is that he used. His model seems to be very sensitive on what you choose as the baseline.

GRIM FORECAST
A senior environmental official at the United Nations, Noel Brown, says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed by the year 2000. Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of “eco-refugees,” threatening political chaos, said Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program. He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human…

You overlooked the fact that 10 pseudoscientific climatological UN years actually represent an imaginary duration.

Not nearly as precise as dog years, the PCUN year is exactly as long as you want it to be – your prediction based on PCUN years can never be shown to be wrong.

Flexible and rubbery inconstant constants are worshipped by the pseudoscientific. An example would be the Greenhouse Effect, which apparently has nothing to do with greenhouses, and cannot be demonstrated to have any effect at all!

I hope I have put you on the right path, and alleviated your concerns somewhat.

Past experience tells us that Steve Goddard or Tony Heller or whatever his real name is not what most would call a credible/reputable source so it is probably prudent to cross check his work. Anyway, Berkeley Earth has a great write up on the adjustments that go into processing GHCN and USHCN datasets.

Today I had some smalltalk at WUWT concerning a station in Prague (Czech Republic, Europe).

A commenter there didn’t trust in Berkeley Earth’s data for his city, and thus I generated a time series of the GHCN V3 station in order to compare the data with BEST’s. The fit couldn’t be better.

*
And suddenly I remembered to have debunked years ago lots of his lies concerning the GHCN dataset: he showed comparisons of unadjusted with adjusted data (of course only in those cases where the latter had a higher trend).

But in fact, it was mostly bare nonsense: the adjusted record clearly had not been manipulated to show more warming, but to eliminate spurious station behavior.

*
Exactly what happened in Prague in the GHCN V3 record for the station

What happened at this Prague station is that till August 1939, it reported temperatures which were biased by 1.77 C… without anybody having noticed it (otherwise, the correction would have been made there).

I’m sure you can always find examples of legitimate adjustments. It does not prove all of them are legitimate. To me, the almost linear relationship between UCHSN and CO2 is a red flag. I have seen the plot in other places than Heller’s, and as of right now, I believe it is correct. If you can show it is not, then please do. If not, please do not offer me red herrings instead.

Salby mentions it all over his presentations. Says they are synonymous-not virtually but SYNONYMOUS. In order to believe that you have to believe that something that contributes 1% to the energy budget is responsible for 100% of the temperature change. In one he chuckled-something about being less conspicuous.

“Mon 8 Oct 2018 02.23 EDT First published on Sun 7 Oct 2018 21.00 EDT
This article is over 5 months old
The worlds leading climate scientists have warned there is only a dozen years for global warming to be kept to a maximum of 1.5C, beyond which even half a degree will significantly worsen the risks of drought, floods, extreme heat and poverty for hundreds of millions of people”

Looks like 30 years later weve added a couple years to our window there JD,

If the trend continues, by 2100 we’ll only have 17 years to deindustrialize… Govts better get busy…

That’s quite a stretch considering that Muller was openly critical of AGW. For example, he threw his lot in with McIntyre and McKitrick in criticizing Mann’s “hockey stick” graph. If this was all just a ruse to con skeptics out of money then he played the part well for nearly a decade. Which explanation is easier to believe…that Muller went to great lengths to con skeptics or that the Earth really has warmed by the amount that the dozen plus datasets including conventional, satellite, and reanalysis had already shown.

The intent here was to coach the administration at the time in sidestepping and deflecting away from the issue.

For example, it was suggested to say things like:

“Scientists can extrapolate all kinds of things from today’s data, but that doesn’t tell us anything about tomorrow’s world.”

And it recommend to “redefine labels” and use the term “climate change” instead of “global warming” because it is “less frightening”.

To be fair though there are some good points and the “Nine Principals of Environmental Policy and Global Warming” aren’t unreasonable…mostly anyway. Though I did find it ironic that the section was labeled “Global Warming” rather than “Climate Change” as was recommended previously in the memo.

“William Happer, a senior director at the NSC and an emeritus Princeton University physics professor not trained in climate science, is leading the effort.”

He seems to be highly qualified in the physics that involve interaction between radiation and matter, unlike the undistinguished mathematician Gavin Schmidt, or the geologist Michael Mann. There is no academic discipline called climatology. Anybody claiming to be a climate scientist is either a fool or a fraud.

Climate is the average of weather, no more no less. Any dimwitted wannabe can claim to be a climate scientist, and many do.

Climate pseudoscience is made up by its practitioners on an ad hoc basis. For example, that supposed firm pillar of support, The Greenhouse Effect, has nothing to do with any physical greenhouse, nor can its mythical effect be reliably observed or quantified.

There is no GHE hypothesis, because the GHE can not actually be observed. No testable GHE hypothesis, no science.

As Richard Feynman said –

‘It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.”

Nobody has yet managed to demonstrate that reducing the amount of energy reaching a thermometer by increasing the amount of CO2 between the Sun and the thermometer, makes the thermometer hotter. So sad, too bad.

“Nobody has yet managed to demonstrate that reducing the amount of energy reaching a thermometer by increasing the amount of CO2 between the Sun and the thermometer, makes the thermometer hotter. So sad, too bad.”

UAH has demonstrated this. In addition they also demonstrated that increasing the amount of CO2 between the upwelling longwave radiation emitted by the Earth and the thermometer, makes the thermometer colder.

Sure you can make various arguments that other physical processes could produce this effect as well. But to be convincing you have to identify the physical process, quantify its magnitude, back test it against all available data, and publish a detailed model of the effect that can be repeated by others for verification. At the very least an observation other than a warming troposphere/hydrosphere simultaneous with a cooling stratosphere would falsify the GHE hypothesis.

I’m not making arguments. I’m just pointing out the stupidity and ignorance of who claim there is a testable GHE hypothesis, such as yourself. You can’t produce a copy of a testable GHE hypothesis, and neither can anybody else!

You could always try claiming that everybody knows what it is, but you can’t quite find your copy, or you have forgotten how to paste on this blog.

Witless fool. The Earth has cooled since its creation. Does your testable GHE hypothesis take this into account? Does the GHE work at night, or indoors, or in winter?

What I’m saying is that a CO2 blanket between the Sun and the thermometer results in a positive radiant perturbation in the vicinity of the thermometer thus making it hotter. Likewise, the same blanket lying between the source of outgoing longwave radiation and a thermometer results in a negative radiant perturbation in the vicinity of the thermometer thus making it colder. The UAH dataset is consistent with the GHE hypothesis. That is the lower troposphere is warming (0.13C/decade) and the stratosphere is cooling (-0.29C/decade).

When I saw “reducing the amount” is your post I honestly just assumed that was a typo and that you were probably talking about an increase.

First, the GHE hypothesis isn’t mine. I didn’t think of it. Second, why would an observation other than a warming troposhere/hydrosphere simultaneous with a cooling stratosphere not be sufficient to falsify it?

“What I’m saying is that a CO2 blanket between the Sun and the thermometer results in a positive radiant perturbation in the vicinity of the thermometer thus making it hotter. Likewise, the same blanket lying between the source of outgoing longwave radiation and a thermometer results in a negative radiant perturbation in the vicinity of the thermometer thus making it colder.”

Complete garbage. The atmosphere reduces the amount of radiation reaching the thermometer. You claim this makes it hotter. Only in a pseudoscientific climatological fantasy!

No GHE. No CO2 heating. Gavin Schmidt is not a world renowned climate scientist – he’s a an undistinguished, demonstrably incompetent mathematician. Michael Mann is not a Nobel Prize winner – nor a climate scientist.

MF, as usual, repeats his usual straw man arguments.
For example, there is a scientific discipline called Atmospheric Science, which studies the thermal processes in question. And, your comment: Climate is the average of weather, is incomplete since climate includes all of statistics, such as extremes of temperature and precipitation, as well as other changes, such as increasing troposphere height.

Lastly, you again repeat your comment which incorrectly states the thermodynamics of thermal energy transfer, which is, the warming occurs in the atmosphere between the surface and the sink of the very cold deep space, not between the Sun and the Earth’s surface.

Next, MF will probably toss out his red herring claim about heating a warmer body with a block of ice. Well, I may post a demonstration of that effect, once I get around to writing it up…

You obviously have difficulty with comprehension. As you can’t figure out how to directly quote me, I’ll help you out. Here’s what I wrote –

“There is no academic discipline called climatology. Anybody claiming to be a climate scientist is either a fool or a fraud.”

Waffling about atmospheric science is completely irrelevant. Maybe you could choose to disagree with my statement, rather than disagreeing with something you created.

Heres the definition of climate – from the World Meteorological Organisation and IPCC –

“Climate in a narrow sense is usually defined as the “average weather,” or more rigorously, as the statistical description in terms of the mean and variability of relevant quantities over a period of time ranging from months to thousands or millions of years. The classical period is 30 years, as defined by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). These quantities are most often surface variables such as temperature, precipitation, and wind. Climate in a wider sense is the state, including a statistical description, of the climate system.”

If you want to use another definition, go ahead. If I want to ignore it, I will.

You wrote –

“Lastly, you again repeat your comment which incorrectly states the thermodynamics of thermal energy transfer, which is, the warming occurs in the atmosphere between the surface and the sink of the very cold deep space, not between the Sun and the Earths surface.”

No, I didn’t repeat (or even say) what you accuse me of. I’m sure if I did, you would have quoted me. You are just making stuff up, as usual. Maybe you would be better off arguing with yourself. You would at least stand a small chance of victory.

I look forward to you demonstrating how to heat water using ice as heat source. I wouldn’t be surprised if you include a sneaky additional heat source or two, hoping nobody will notice. A foolish pseudoscientist might try such a stupid thing, I guess.

MF, I was attempting to point to your simplistic definition of climate. Notice that the WMO definition includes all the statistics, not just averages. In any event, it should be obvious that climate change is the result of the weather changing. Weather is almost never “average”, is it? The only way to measure climate is to compile weather statistics over an appropriate period of time.

Your latest definition of your ice block challenge is of no relevance to the problem of AGW on the real Earth or to my experiments, both of which include an input of energy from an external source. Just another example of the usual obfuscation from one whose apparent goal is to add to efforts by the denialist camp to ignore mankind’s impacts on the planet.

Improve methods to quantify uncertainties of climate projections and scenarios, including development and exploration of long-term ensemble simulations using complex models. The climate system is a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible. Rather the focus must be upon the prediction of the probability distribution of the system’s future possible states by the generation of ensembles of model solutions. Addressing adequately the statistical nature of climate is computationally intensive and requires the application of new methods of model diagnosis, but such statistical information is essential. (TAR WG I Chapter 14)

Of course, you (and others) continue to ignore the fact that neither the Greenhouse Effect or my Green Plate Demo violate the 2nd Law because there’s an energy source providing a flow of energy thru each system. Rant all you want, you can’t change physics.

I notice you don’t dispute what I quoted. No matter how you try to justify the pseudoscientific climatological nonsense, predicting future climate states is not possible. Can’t be done. Anybody who claims to be able to predict climate states is a fool or a fraud.

Generating ensembles is a complete waste of time. If an ensemble consists of a thousand different results, then at least 999 must be wrong. More likely, none are correct, but in any case, if one result just happened to be correct, which one do you pick?

The text you emphasised is just the sciencey ramblings of people like the rather dim Gavin Schmidt, trying to keep the money flowing. Model diagnosis is pointless – even you should have realised that by now. There is no GHE description, no testable GHE hypothesis, just a ragtag mob of delusionally psychotic individuals, convinced of their ability to turn fantasy into fact. Not much science there, eh?

Maybe you could quote me in relation to your nonsensical assertions about any comments that your fantasy has me making. Or maybe you can’t, because your delusion is only faintly attached to reality.

Carry on heating stuff. Be amazed that a heat source can transmit energy to an object. At least it keeps you calm and off the streets, I suppose.

CO2 heats nothing. The Earth has cooled over the last four and a half billion years, as evidenced by the fact that if you look between your feet, you don’t see glowing molten rock. That is reality – climatological pseudoscience notwithstanding.

No one is putting anyone at risk. This whole AGW is a false, unscientific narrative that leftists are using to try to gain more power-nothing else. It has been falsified many times already. Your ilk’s only reason for ignoring is that it isn’t about anything other than the agenda of the radical left.

No one is putting anyone at risk. This whole AGW is a false, unscientific narrative that leftists are using to try to gain more power-nothing else. It has been falsified many times already. Your ilk’s only reason for ignoring is that it isn’t about anything other than the agenda of the radical left.

Rex Tillerson is my ilk.
He says you have to be fact based.
He says this is a serious risk.
He had an independent science department at his disposal when he was head of Exxon.
Why did they not discover that it was a leftist hoax?
Because Tillerson is leftist?
Grant him 3.5 minutes here:https://tinyurl.com/y34fz3rb

If the satellite sea level they show was just the level relative to the geoide it would be OK.
Unfortunately they mix in some GIA to make the sea level represent the amount of water in the sea.
I dont care of the amount of water, and those who care could figure it out by them selves, i only care for the level at the shores.

woodfortrees.org is just a data repository. The problem is with GISS, which uses several dodgy nudges to mask the slowdown at the turn of the century, which is readily apparent in just about every other major data set.

E,, That was my first take also. After collecting the multiple compelling data that CO2 had little, if any, effect on climate, discovering the 7% increase in WV since 1960, running an assessment which shows 98.3% match with measured avg global temp 1895-2018 considering WV, ocean cycles & time-integral of SSN anomalies, realizing WV declines from avg 10,000 ppm at surface to about 32 ppm at about 10 km (-50 K), realizing CO2 molecules outnumber WV molecules about 12 to 1 above about 10 km, understanding the notch(es) and spikes centered on main wavenumber for CO2 & O3, in TOA graphs of flux vs wavenumber, determining that WV increase correlates with irrigation increase, it all makes sense that WV has been humanity’s contribution (less than 0.4 K) to GW and it is self-limiting

I don’t know whether the figures are accurate, but Our World in Data shows fossil fuel energy production in 2017 about 22 times that of 1900, at about 133 TWh.

Given that combustion of hydrocarbon fossil fuels results in the production of CO(2) and H2O at the least, might not additional CO2 and H2O in the atmosphere result from burning lots and lots of stuff?

Of course, these figures do not include all the extra combustion from a massively increased population since 1900, nor the additional CO2 etc from increased oxygen breathing life, from bacteria to blue whales ( substitute something else if you like – I was just using blue whales to illustrate the range of oxygen breathers).

I assume we will cope with the reduction in O2 caused by all this temporary sequestration into CO2 and H2O.

I remain optimistic. Hopefully, the universe is unfolding as it should!

Have you looked oceanic heat content? It’s a better metric for quantifying the heating because the oceans account for 90% of the uptake whereas the troposphere, cryosphere, land, etc. combine for the rest.

The oceans are heated from the bottom, of course. That is why they don’t freeze through. Warmer (less dense) water floats. Any water heated by the sun floats – it doesn’t sink. Anybody who believes less dense water can displace denser water, and sink, is just stupid and ignorant.

Foolish fellows such as Trenberth believe that heat is hiding in the oceans – without heating the water it is hiding in. If it did, the heated water would rise. Once on the top, at night, it would radiate heat to space, cool, and sink, displacing now warmer water to the surface , continuously. Eventually, the densest (not necessarily the coldest due to the wonderfully weird properties of water) water reaches the bottom – not far from the red-hot mantle below.

No Polar cooling, and water magically flowing around the sphere to the tropics. No deep ocean currents at 180 degrees to each other because of surface winds. Some people at NOAA and NASA are obviously afflicted with infectious pseudoscientism. Just like the NSF, who for years strenuously resisted the fact that Archmedes’ principle applies around the world, whether US pseudoscientists agree with it or not.

Carry on. I don’t expect a testable GHE hypothesis from you any time soon. Maybe an explanation of how reducing the radiation to a thermometer makes it show a higher temperature? Perturbations in the vicinity, perhaps? Or maybe it’s just a pseudoscientific delusion.

MF, As usual, you give a garbled description of ocean heat flow. To be sure, the densest waters do sink to the bottom and those originate from only a few locations at high latitudes. As a result, the sinking waters are very cold, so the oceans are continually being “refilled” from the bottom up with those water flows at near freezing temperatures. It should be obvious that these facts show that the sinking of cold water totally overwhelms the geothermal energy added to the bottom of the Earth’s oceans, else the temperature profiles from the bottom to the surface would be much different.

Of course, you also ignore the effects of salt on the oceans’ circulation. True, pure water exhibits a maximum density at around 4 deg C, but add in salt and the density continues to increase until freezing occurs below 0 deg C. When the water freezes at the surface, salt is rejected from the crystalline matrix, which further densifies the surrounding water, which also promotes sinking. The combination of these process drive the thermohaline circulation that you allude to.

No Polar cooling, and water magically flowing around the sphere to the tropics. No deep ocean currents at 180 degrees to each other because of surface winds.

Then next claimed:

You mutter about me alluding to the thermohaline circulation. Of course I didnt.

What does the first quote pertain to if not the Thermahaline circulation? True, the Gulf Stream is a wind driven Western Boundary Current, but a portion of that flow, roughly 1/4, branches toward the north, eventually cooling and sinking to the bottom. That sinking and a similar process around the Antarctic, are the reason the world’s oceans exhibit temperatures near 0 C at depth, even at tropical latitudes.

I doubt you have brought any additional joy into his life, by showing him this –

“More of the heat in the Earth is lost through plate tectonics, by mantle upwelling associated with mid-ocean ridges. The final major mode of heat loss is by conduction through the lithosphere, the majority of which occurs in the oceans due to the crust there being much thinner and younger than under the continents.

Oh well, he can always close his eyes and refuse to look. Or close his mind, and refuse to consider that a big molten blob in space has no choice except to cool.

MF: this might also interest Binidon:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mponeng_Gold_Mine
It’s a gold mine in South Africa, and two and a half miles down the temperature is 60 degreesC.
Similar figures are given for the Tautona mine, also in South Africa, where the rock face temperature at a similar depth is 60C.

You could show a significant correalation between any two of those eight.

But as has been pointed out elsewhere correalation does not prove causation. Wearing of shorts increases in Summer, but shorts do not cause Summer.

Cause and effect is another matter. You can be reasonably confident that Summer causes shorts.

Talk to a physicist and he will tell you that absolute humidity, the mass of water vapour the atmosphere can hold, increases by 7% per degree C and the WV GHE increases with it.

Interactions betweenWV and climate get very complicated, but the bottom line is that warmer conditions cause greater WV. It is uncommon to see spontaneous incresases in WV producing increases in temperature. In the argot, temperature is the forcing and water vapour is the feedback.

It might be possible to see increased WV and increased temperature locally over an irrigated area, but irrigation does not cover enough ground to have a worldwide effect.

Both temperature and water vapor are both forcing and feedback. The water vapor increase since 1960 is about twice what it would be from temperature increase alone. Water vapor increase is self-limiting. Since 2002 CO2 has increased by 40% of the increase 1800-2002 while the temperature has been essentially flat except for the el Nino that peaked in Jan 2016 and later smaller ones which are still playing out.https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D2TdkhoVYAAd_g4.jpg

WV increase is measured and reported by NASA/RSS. Rough calcs show their 1.69% increase since about 1990 agrees (close enough) with NCEPR1, 1.63% & NCEPR2, 1.4%. The slope increase in temperature and WV both correlate with slope increase in water use which is about 86% irrigation.

This GHE hypothesis would be the one that you can’t actually lay your hands on, just at the moment, would it? No wonder. It doesn’t exist, which is why anybody pretending it does is either a fool or a fraud.

But hey, if Michael Mann can pretend to be a Nobel Prize-winner, and Gavin Schmidt can pretend to be a climate scientist, claiming that a testable (or any rational) GHE hypothesis exists is small potatoes by comparison.

Join the slavering pack of fools tagging along after the pack of bearded balding bumbling buffoons, if you wish. At least you won’t have to waste your limited mental resources thinking. Just believe. You don’t need facts if you have faith.

bdgwx, Thanks for posting the link to my JTECH report, which I did not known had become open for all to read. I presume that you also saw my later presentation from the 2017 AGU meeting, which was an update to the JTECH paper using more recent versions of the data sets. As Bindidon notes, it should be obvious that the differences between these data sets must be resolved if they are to be relied on to assess what’s going on with the Earth’s climate.

swanson, I believe the AMS journals provides open access for anything older than 2 years. It likely became open only recently.

And yes. I had a hunch that this was your publication 🙂

And in case my point wasn’t obvious I’ll make it now for others. One explanation for UAH’s divergence from multiple datasets including conventional and reanalysis in addition to the comparisons that were made in the publication could be because the scientific consensus “haven’t been able to affect that data set yet.” Or…maybe…just maybe, it is because there is a more rational, objective, and technical reason why it is the outlier and which does not need to invoke conspiracy. I’m just saying…

Or…maybe…just maybe, it is because there is a more rational, objective, and technical reason why it is the outlier and which does not need to invoke conspiracy.

As I pointed out in my AGU paper, Figure 6, the differences in the respective TMT time series appeared most profound in the MSU portion of the respective series. UAH was warmer than RSS (Fig 6.a) at the beginning of the series and UAH was also warmer than NOAA STAR (Fig 6.b) then. However, RSS was warmer than NOAA STAR (Fig 6.c) during that same time period. Since the UAH series begins at a higher brightness temperature, the trend over the entire period turns out to be less than either RSS or NOAA STAR.

What I understand from reading Spencer and Christy’s paper describing their UAH version 6 is that they treat the MSU data with a different approach than that which they used for the AMSU data. I suppose this may be one reason for the divergence. The apparent difference between RSS and NOAA STAR is another matter. Then too, one must also be aware that UAH and RSS compute their LT or TLT differently, with UAH combining their “TP” product, which includes MSU channel 3, in a theoretical combination. The early MSU 3 data suffered several problems, which is the reason S & C didn’t use it after 1992 when they began to promote their TLT.

Of course, I have no clue about the actual technical reason(s) for these differences, besides than the NOAA 9 warm target question…

If there is an outlier in the surface corner, then it is NOAA land, which for 1979-present shows an estimate of 0.29 C / decade, while GISS accurately stays near the averaged station data (0.22 C GISS vs. 0.21 C stations).

This cannot be shown here because Paul Clark did not add NOAA into his datasets. I’m too busy today to generate a graph out of Libre Office wiht my downloaded data.

Just logically you have to realize that model is wrong. If you understand just basic mathematics you have to realize that. CO2 can’t have the residence time(s) they claim. If the total emissions rate is roughly 100ppm and the equilibrium level in the atmosphere is a little over 400ppm you have to be able to logically deduce that the residence time can’t be decades or centuries. That’s like 5th grade math.

Intuitively you have to realize the equilibrium level or equilibrium ratio of anthropogenic CO2 to natural CO2 in the atmosphere is in the exact same ratio as its emission ratio of approximately 4%-5th grade level math folks.

The majority of free carbon in the system cycles between the atmosphere/ocean and the biosphere.

CO2 is released by respiration and decay, resides in the atmosphere for an average of four years and is then taken up again by photosynthesis and remains as biomass until it is respired again.

Since CO2 uptake by photosynthesis and release by respiration balance the CO2 concentration is not affected.

Along comes the Industrial Revolution. Humanity burn fossil fuels and make cement, releasing CO2 which has been out of circulation for millions of years and increasing the amount of CO2 in circulation.

Now the system is out of balance. Some of the CO2 excess is absorbed by the oceans(thank you, Henry’s Law) and some by the biosphere ( the greening ofthe planet) but about half of what we produce goes to increase the concentration in the air.

Now the system is out of balance. Some of the CO2 excess is absorbed by the oceans(thank you, Henry’s Law) and some by the biosphere ( the greening ofthe planet) but about half of what we produce goes to increase the concentration in the air.

If about half of what we produce goes to increase the concentration in the air then why would that be a problem? Half of 8 is 4gtc which is 1.88ppm. A four year residence time gives 7.6ppm. Turn that off and CO2 is still at 402ppm. With your scenario we’re only contributing 2%. Doesn’t fit what’s actually happening but if that’s what you want to believe go ahead.

Oh dear, oh dear. What a pity. I suppose the average dimwit doesn’t realise that the only time the “system” is balanced is when the surface temperature reaches a point where it is not changing – that is , energy in is equal to energy out.

This odd phenomenon usually occurs twice a day – when the temperature reaches its maximum, and again when it reaches the minimum. How does CO2 (or the lack thereof) change the character and number of the inflection points?

The Earth has cooled over the last four and half billion years, which would indicate to anyone except an aforementioned member of the dimwit class, that energy out vastly exceeded energy in – in spite of the considerable energy emitted by the Sun over that period.

Keep at it. I’m sure you can dig into your pseudoscientific jargon bag, and extract a few more examples of sublimely irrelevant and nonsensical statements.

Now the system is out of balance. Some of the CO2 excess is absorbed by the oceans(thank you, Henrys Law) and some by the biosphere ( the greening ofthe planet) but about half of what we produce goes to increase the concentration in the air.

If about half of what we produce goes to increase the concentration in the air then why would that be a problem? Half of 8 is 4gtc which is 1.88ppm. A four year residence time gives 7.6ppm. Turn that off and CO2 is still at 402ppm. With your scenario we’re only contributing 2%. Doesn’t fit what’s actually happening but if that’s what you want to believe go ahead.

I think you confusing residence time and lifetime.You keep talking about residence time when you should be using lifetime.

Residence time is the time an average individual CO2 molecule spends in the atmosphere before being absorbed by the ocean or the biosphere. This is estimated between 5 and 11 years.

Both the ocean and the biosphere are in equilibrium, returning CO2 molecules to the atmosphere at the same rate that they are absorbing. Residence time is not relevant to long term changes in CO2 concentration.

Lifetime is the time taken for a pulse of extra CO2 to be permanently removed by weathering and/or sediment formation. TThis pulse might come from vulcanism,(eg the PETM or the Permean extinction). It might also come from industrial emissions.The lifetime for CO2 is somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 years.

For example, you say

” half of what we produce goes to increase the concentration in the air then why would that be a problem? Half of 8 is 4gtc which is 1.88ppm. A four year residence time gives 7.6ppm. ”

That is fine as far as it goes. We release 8gtC. Half of that stays in the atmosphere, 4gtC or 1.88ppm. That is roughly the observed annual rate of increase. After four years the increase becomes 7.6ppm. Again correct.

BUt! Those extra CO2 molecules are now in the system. Exchanges between atmosphere, ocean and biosphere take place as usual, following the existing residence time, but exchange does not make them disappear. That 1.88ppm/year of added CO2 is not disappearing, it is accumulating.

Unfortunately, you are wasting your time. CO2 heats nothing. Therefore, trying to pretend that “residence time” or “lifetime” of CO2 is relevant, is just more meaningless pseudoscientific climatological jargon.

If you had a description of the GHE which included some reference to CO2 and temperature rises, it would be a good start. It might lead to a testable GHE hypothesis, which might, once again, involve things like CO2 concentrations, temperature and so on.

Who gives a toss about your attempts to turn fantasy into fact? What about that most important so called “greenhouse gas” – water? What is its “lifetime” or “residence time”? I suppose blathering about water doesn’t sound nearly as sciencey as blathering about CO2.

Keep talking nonsense. Maybe you can rise within the pseudoscientific climatological cult. It seems to be populated with a goodly assortment of fakers, bumblers and wannabes. Fake Nobel Prize winners, pretend scientists – you might fit right in.

Maybe you can tell someone how increasing the amount of CO2 or H2O between the Sun and a thermometer makes the thermometer hotter? By casting special magic spells, while chanting the sacred Manntras?

What a load of rubbish! Carry on regardless, Em. Take no notice of unbelievers – your deity is mighty, and will lay the skeptics low! (Cue sounds of raucous laughter.)

EM is correct. There is a difference between the residence time of individual molecules and the lifetime for a pulse of CO2.

The paleoclimate record confirms that pulses happen relatively fast, but atmospheric depletion occurs very slowly. For example, interglacial ascent occur quickly, but the glacial descents take almost 100,000 years before the CO2 is fully depleted to glacial levels.

In lieu of scrubbing CO2 from the atmosphere the anthroprogenic pulse will likely last thousands and possibly even tens of thousands of years.

The residence time can’t be between 5 and 11 years. If the yearly emission is 98.6ppm + 3.8 ppm = 102.4 ppm then a 5 year residence time would give an atmospheric equilibrium of 510ppm and an 11 year residence time would give us an equilibrium level of 1122ppm. Since we know from atmospheric measurement at Mauna Loa that equilibrium level is roughly 410ppm, then residence time must be about 4 years. As far as your “lifetime” term I have seen that some people refer to residence time as lifetime and use the term interchangeably, but Salby refers to it as residence time and therefore is what I prefer to use. Any other definition of the term is nonsense.

Residence time is a measure of how fast CO2 approaches its equilibrium level when emission is constant. Residence time equals the average lifetime of molecule. Residence time also equals the time for the “level to adjust to a new equilibrium” level. They are the same thing.

Residence time of molecules does not equal the concentration lifetime for a pulse of CO2.

Remember, an anthroprogenic molecule will typically get exchanged 1–for-1 with a natural molecule in about 5 years. The end result is that the anthroprogenic molecule is no longer in the atmosphere, but the concentration increase is. That doesn’t mean the anthroprogenic molecule disappeared. It just seems that it went somewhere else in the carbon cycle other than the atmosphere where it originally got emitted to. The carbon cycle as a whole still experienced an increase in mass of carbon.

The point I’m getting at is AGW has been falsified in two ways. (1) Natural CO2 emission evolves according to the time integral of temperature. Temperature level did not change when anthropogenic emission increased after 2002. And, (2) anthropogenic CO2 only contributes about 4% to the equilibrium level.

SPA, Your logic ignores the massive increase in the rate of emissions of aerosols from the developing nations, particularly China and India. The continuing emissions of aerosols may be resulting in a cooling trend which would negate some or all of the warming from the increase in CO2 during the same time period. Not to forget, the US has been fighting more than 2 wars since 9/11/2001, blasting lots of stuff into the atmosphere as well. Focusing only on the impact of CO2 emissions misses the total picture, IMHO.

If the CO2/Greenhouse Effect has been falsified, why has there been a continuing decline in Arctic sea-ice minimum extent over the same period? The UAH satellite data isn’t the only measure of climate change.

1) Salby doesn’t claim it hasn’t been warming, in fact the opposite. The warming is the cause of the CO2 increase.

2) According to Berkley Earth the temperature increase from 1850 to now and CO2 increase are synonymous. Salby asks how can something that is 1% of the energy budget be responsible for 100% of the warming?

SPA, You use the word “synonymous”. I think that you intended to use synchronous. The increase in CO2 has followed the exponential increase in fossil fuel consumption since 1850, it’s not linear, which it’s been said to be the change in global temperature.

Besides, I suspect that you don’t grasp the enormity of what China has been doing. It’s claimed that the cement production by China between 2011 and 2013 amounted to more than the amount used by the US for the entire 20th century. China is the number 1 consumer of coal as well. All those reports of smog in China should give you an idea of their aerosol emissions, which have increased drastically as a result.

You are also forgetting the the apparent cooling seen after WW II, which appeared to reverse after the US and Europe began to control sulfate emissions. China’s rapid growth in coal fired electric generation, recently bringing online a new plant every week or so, means more low elevation SO2 emissions. China is the world’s largest manufacturer of automobiles and their fleet represents new consumption, since they have only just begun to have enough wealth for individuals to own cars.

The Industrial Revolution raised temperatures? How did it do that? Show me your math. I’ve already shown you that anthropogenic CO2 could not have caused the CO2 increase. Also, do you have any decadal data on natural CO2 emission?

I had hoped for worked examples showing that your hypothesis can successfully predict the change in CO2 from the change in temperature in my two examples. This is how you test a hypothesis, by showing that it successfully predicts reality.

I would do the calculation myself, but you have’nt given me enough information.

Nice to have intelligent questions by the way. The anthropogenic CO2 goes into the atmosphere, resides there for an average of 4 years and then gets absorbed with all the rest of the CO2. The Souce of the 130ppm CO2 is 96% natural emission and 4% anthropogenic emission. Surface temperature increase causes an increase in natural emission.

If natural emission is 210GTC and anthropogenic emission is 8GTC, and absorbers don’t discriminate between natural and anthropogenic CO2, then how can anthropogenic be more than 4% of the equilibrium level of 410ppm?

Given that you don’t even have a testable GHE hypothesis, because you don’t know how to describe the GHE, why all the stupid questions?

Are you just trying to waste everyone’s time, hoping no one will notice that you are just trying to deny, divert, and confuse?

Why are you so intent on appearing stupid and ignorant in your pursuit of pseudoscientific nonsense? Has the Earth cooled over the last four and half billion years? Can you make a thermometer hotter by surrounding it with CO2?

Do you really expect people to believe that fools such as Gavin Schmidt and Michael Mann know what they are talking about?

If you are trying to get an award for the most inane and pointless comment, you might have to do a little better. Maybe you could just declare that unicorns must exist, because nobody can prove they don’t.

Don’t blame me for your stupidity. You manage to be stupid without my assistance. Do you have to put much effort into it, or does it come naturally?

Hanging on to a molten rock is likely to prove injurious to your health. That’s why Nature has graciously allowed the molten Earth to cool – for our convenience. I don’t know why you want to change this state of affairs, but go your hardest. CO2 has no heat generating capacity, so you might have to resort to earnest prayers.

bdgwx: you ask ‘why is the pH of the ocean declining’?
I ask: which ocean, exactly, and by how much?
Below is a sensible take on ocean pH which discusses factors other than (yawn) anthropogenic ‘carbon’. This of course is from a time before all the crackpot nonsense about ‘ocean acidification’ took hold.
Global Biogeochemical Cycles
Seasonal variation of CO2 and nutrients in the high‐latitude surface oceans: A comparative study
Taro Takahashi Jon Olafsson John G. Goddard David W. Chipman S. C. Sutherland
First published: December 1993 https://doi.org/10.1029/93GB02263 Cited by: 523
Abstract
Seasonal data for pCO2 and the concentrations of CO2 and nutrients in high‐latitude surface oceans obtained by the Lamont‐Doherty CO2 group and Marine Research Institute, Reykjavik, are presented and analyzed. The seasonal progression and relationships between these properties are described, and their inter‐ocean variation is compared. Spring phytoplankton blooms in the surface water of the North Atlantic Ocean and Iceland Sea caused a precipitous reduction of surface water pCO2 and the concentrations of CO2 and nutrients within two weeks, and proceeded until the nutrient salts were exhausted. This type of seasonal behavior is limited to the high‐latitude (north of approximately 40°N) North Atlantic Ocean and adjoining seas. In contrast, seasonal changes in CO2 and nutrients were more gradual in the North Pacific and the nutrients were only partially consumed in the surface waters of the subarctic North Pacific Ocean and Southern Ocean. The magnitude of seasonal changes in nutrient concentrations in the North Pacific and Southern Oceans was similar to that observed in the North Atlantic and adjoining seas. In the subpolar and polar waters of the North and South Atlantic and North Pacific Oceans, pCO2 and the concentrations Of CO2 and nutrients were much higher during winter than summer. During winter, the high latitude areas of the North Atlantic, North Pacific, and Weddell Sea were sources for atmospheric CO2; during summer, they became CO2 sinks. This is attributed to the upwelling of deep waters rich in CO2 and nutrients during winter, and the intense photosynthesis occurring in strongly stratified upper layers during summer. On the other hand, subtropical waters were a CO2 source in summer and a sink in winter. Since these waters were depleted of nutrients and could only sustain low levels of primary production, the seasonal variation of pCO2 in subtropical waters and the CO2 sink/source condition were governed primarily by temperature. An intense CO2 sink zone was found along the confluence of the subtropical and subpolar waters (or the subtropical convergence). Its formation is attributed to the combined effects of cooling in subtropical waters and drawdown of CO2 in subpolar waters.

bdgwx: The last sentence in my previous post should read in full as follows:
‘An intense CO2 sink zone was found along the confluence of the subtropical and subpolar waters (or the subtropical convergence). Its formation is attributed to the combined effects of cooling in subtropical waters and photosynthetic drawdown of CO2 in subpolar waters.’
Notice the theme of pH variability for various reasons which is a feature of this paper.
No bizarre claims of world-wide ocean pH reduction due to human CO2 emissions, and no inane claims about ‘acidification’
– instead, we read a very interesting presentation of factors which affect ocean pH other than the usual CO2/H20 aspect.
Sea water is not pure water – it contains living oragnisms which metabolise, and die – sea water contains proteins, which can also act as proton donors and acceptors. The regulation of sea water pH is clearly a far more complex process than is suggested by the ‘acidification’ scaremongers.

You should read some of Takahashi’s other publications. In the same year as the publication linked to above he published Ocean Uptake of Carbon Dioxide in which he estimated that 55% of fossil fuel carbon stays in the atmosphere. 35% is taken up by the ocean and the remaining 10% is unaccounted for.

bdgwx: The IPCC in their book ‘Climate Change 2007 – The Physical Science Basis’ state on p48 that ‘the uptake of anthropogenic carbon since 1750 has led to the ocean becoming more acidic, with an average decrease in pH of 0.1 units’ followed by the statement that ‘the overall pH change is computed from estimates of anthropogenic carbon uptake and simple ocean models.’
How can the oceans possibly become more acidic when they’re alkaline, and always have been? This is nothing less than a deliberate and irresponsible twisting of words to suit the narrative of those who wish for their own reasons to misinform the public. ‘Computed from estimates’? One can only laugh.
Yet on page 405 the IPCC state (more sensibly) that ‘the mean pH of surface waters ranges between 7.9 and 8.3 in the open ocean.’
Given the variability of pH due to several causes in the oceans which is plainly evident from the Takahashi paper I referred to earlier, and the IPCC’s own admission that ocean pH varies over quite a wide range, what is the point of inferring that the average pH of the world’s oceans has decreased by 0.1 units? It’s nonsense, just another silly scary story put about by so-called scientists who really should know better.

CO2 moves between reservoirs and spends various amounts of time there.

The longest lifetime reservoir is the rocks and the mantle. CO2 enters the atmosphere from volcanoes and returns to the mantle by subduction. Lifetime- millions to billions of years.

The next is coal and oil. That is CO2 trapped by photosynthesis 300 million years ago and released now as we burn fossil fuels.

Then you have peat and methane clathrates formed during past glacial periods, some is now being released as permafrost thaws and decays. Lifetime- up to 100,000 years.

Finally you have the active carbon stores, oceans, atmosphere and biomass. These exchange CO2 with the atmosphere and each other. CO2 held in these stores has not disappeared from circulation permanently, it moves on after anything from a few minutes up to 1000 years.

This site has a bad habit of rejecting comments containing some technical vocabulary, not alway predictably. Radiation physics terminology is particularly affected.

Because of a particular nuisance commenter the letters d and c in some combitations can also trigger the filter.

Not ofuscation. Like water in three interconnected tanks, in the short term CO2 moves back and forth between three reservoirs, the atmosphere, the biosphere and the oceans.

Exchange with the biosphere is large enough to produce a clear seasonal oscillation in the atmosphere’s CO2 concentration. Cut down a forest and you dump more CO2 into the atmosphere. Grow a new forest and you remove CO2 from the atmosphere.

The ocean exchanges CO2 with the atmosphere in accordance with Henry’s law and Van t’Hoff’s law. Double the atmospheric CO2 and you double the dissolved CO2. Lower the ocean temperature by 25C and it can hold twice as much before it saturates.

The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is the critical value for global warming, but if you want to understand how it changes over time you must consider ocean and biosphere as well.

Karl Popper pointed out people’s tendency to look for single causes for things, but reality is not that simple.

Everybody is in agreement that the residence time of individual molecules is relatively short being on the order of years.

But we don’t really care about the residence time of individual molecules for two reasons.

First, it has little relevance to the fundamental physical processes that define the GHG effect.

Second, it has little relevance on what the lifetime of the mass perturbation is for a pulse of CO2.

What we care about is the lifetime of the mass of CO2 in the atmosphere after a pulse is emitted into the atmosphere. The mass of the pulse does not deplete in 4 years. It is more like thousands. And if you take feedbacks into account it is more like tens of thousands or possibly even longer if the initial pulse is large enough to trigger certain tipping points.

By the way, many of my posts are getting filtered as well. I had a lot more content in that post above that I had to trim off to get it to finally post. My advice is to copy the text of your posts to the clipboard first so that you don’t risk losing it all when you press submit.

The biosphere absorbs about 1/4 of the CO2 in the atmosphere each year.(Hence the 4 year residence time). It releases almost all of tht back into the atmosphere again. Human emissions add on top of that natural emission.

IIRC the full annual atmospheric budget looks more like this.

Emissions from biosphere 99ppm

Emissions from human activity 4ppm

Total emissions 99+4=103ppm

Absorbtion by biosphere 100ppm

Absorbtion by ocean 1ppm

Total absorbtion 100+1=101ppm

Net annual increase in concentration is total emissions-total absorbtion 103-101=2ppm

E-man,
OK, finally we’re getting somewhere. So, again I ask you if anthropogenic emission is 4% of the total emission, how can equilibrium level of atmosphereic CO2 be more than 4% of the equilibrium level? The 130ppm rise of CO2 that has been ascribed to fossil fuel burning is false. Only 5.2ppm of the rise is due to fossil fuel. The rest, natural.

The carbon cycle was balanced (or least mostly) for most of the holocene. This is why CO2 concentrations were relatively stable. Then humans started pumping large amounts of carbon into the atmosphere thus disrupting the balance. Today the imbalance is due to a 4% increase emissions (from anthroprogenic sources) with 50% of the imbalance being buffered by natural sinks. This effectively reduces the imbalance to 2%. A 2% year-after-year imbalance adds up fast. Anthroprogenic behaviors account for nearly 100% of the 130 ppm increase from 280 ppm.

Again, I ask where do you think all of the CO2 we pumped into the atmosphere went? And where do you think the all of that atmospheric CO2 came from if not from anthroprogenic sources like fossil fuel burning, concrete manufacturing, land use changes, etc.?

Let’s start at the beginning. For argument sake there is no CO2 in the atmosphere and we are at point time zero. At time zero the planet emits a CO2 molecule and it takes a year to emit the molecule so that at the end of the year there is one molecule in the atmosphere. Follow me so far?

Tossing out terms like “molecular vibration” and “induced dipole moment” is just stupid, without providing context.

You might care to explain how your sciencey sounding diversion resulted in the cooling of the Earth’s surface?

Does moving into the shade or waiting for night result in reduced “molecular vibration” and “induced dipole moment”? Has your greenhouse effect taken a holiday for four and a half billion years, only to be conjured up by latter day wizards?

It doesn’t seem very likely, does it?

No wonder you can’t describe the GHE! Just like the rest of the pseudoscientific delusional psychotics, you have no real clue.

I’m sure you can come up with all sorts of ways for me to waste my time, but any time you spend doing so is wasted time, I assure you.

Just saying that the “subject” is “pretty complex” is stupid and ignorant, if you can’t even define the “subject”, ie the GHE.

Carry on with your pseudoscientific attempts to pretend that you are wise and knowledgeable, rather than stupid and ignorant.

Feynman said (in regard to the theory of quantum electron thermodynamics) that “The only phenomena not covered by this theory are phenomenon of gravitation and nuclear phenomena; everything else is contained in this theory.” Maybe you disagree. I don’t.

You somewhat undermine your pretence to knowledge by referring to a “GHE effect”. Do you not realise that the mythical GHE is an acronym for Green House Effect? The GHE does not “play out” in the atmosphere. If it did, you would be able to describe it (which you can’t, of course), and devise a testable GHE hypothesis (which neither you nor anybody else can do, either).

What a fool. Quoting random and irrelevant rubbish from Wikipedia won’t help you to convince rational observers that you have a clue. It is obvious you don’t! Neither do the editors of the Wikipedia article about “Greenhouse Effect”. At least the idiotic fanatic William Connolley was given the boot – his pseudoscientific nonsense was too much even for Wikipedia!

Have you used your pseudoscience to figure out how reducing the amount of energy reaching a thermometer makes it hotter? No? Maybe you don’t have enough 15 um radiation? Try compressing CO2 – you can get almost any temperature you want. No pseudoscientific blather needed.

MF, molecular physics isn’t psuedoscience. And the GHE does not work by reducing the amount of radiation reaching a thermometer. It’s the opposite. It increases the amount of radiation reaching a thermometer.

“And the GHE does not work by reducing the amount of radiation reaching a thermometer. Its the opposite. It increases the amount of radiation reaching a thermometer.”

Is that your definition of the GHE? Under what experimental circumstances may this miraculous effect be observed? It might seem to some, that energy can not be created. Something to do with the laws of thermodynamics.

Now if the GHE increases the amount of radiation reaching a thermometer, then additional energy has to come from nothing at all. Rubbish. You are trying to make stuff up as you go.

The Earth has cooled over the last four and a half billion years or so. The highest temperatures on Earth are achieved where the amount of supposed GHGs in the atmosphere is least. Your GHE definition seems to be lacking in reality. Try being a pretentious fool, arguing from your self proclaimed authority! Try using more sciencey words. I’m inclined to believe that the dimwits at the IPCC who wrote –

“Rather the focus must be upon the prediction of the probability distribution of the system s future possible states by the generation of ensembles of model solutions.”

probably glanced at a Wikipedia article on quantum electrodynamics, and thought that climatology was very, very, sciencey – so talk of probability distribution might make people believe that climatologists were just as clever as real scientists. The electron magnetic dipole moment has been measured by experiment to about 0.3 parts per trillion – in agreement with QED calculations.

And yes, QED calculations are based on probability amplitudes. On the other hand, climatological calculations are based on delusional wishful thinking, and quite pointless. Maybe you could pretend to some other type of physical knowledge? You aren’t doing so well with what you have tried so far.

The GHE converts quantized photon energy into thermal energy that is then conducted to nearby molecules, dispersed via convection, and radiated toward the surface.

The effect works to separate warm and cool areas in the atmosphere. The troposphere warms while the stratosphere cools. This does not violate the 2LOT because work is being performed on the system. The atmosphere is not an isolated system.

This effect was first discovered by Tyndall’s gas tube experiments. But it wasn’t until quantum mechanics and infrared spectroscopy matured after WWII that scientists were able to explain the effect at its most fundamental level.

I only brought up the fundamental physical process of the GHE because molecular vibration is not sensitive (with caveats) to different isotopes of carbon because neutrons are electrically neutral and thus do not participate in the dipole moment changes in molecules. In laymens terms this means an anthroprogenic molecule of CO2 will behave identically (with caveats) to a natural molecule of CO2 in regards to the GHE even though they may have identifying traits in regards to the isotopic compositions.

Just more pseudoscientific nonsense. All matter above 0 K radiates – photons, in fact, are how radiation is transmitted.

You are spouting pseudoscience. Maybe you could describe the GHE in some usable fashion. You have uttered a load of gibberish, but even so, you might like to describe the supposed effects of the GHE which cannot be explained in terms of quantum electrodynamics. Too difficult?

Maybe you could seek assistance from the incompetent mathematician, Gavin Schmidt, and his wondrous but completely useless computer games? Or do you agree with Schmidt that 38% likelihood means “almost certain”?

MF, while it is true that all matter radiates. That is a concept that is different from molecular vibration. Not all molecules, nevermind matter in general, will vibrate in response to electromagnetic stimulation in the IR band.

This is for other observers who might inadvertently believe your pseudoscientific appeals to your own authority –

“Thermal energy emitted by matter as a result of vibrational and rotational movements of molecules, atoms and electrons. The energy is transported by electromagnetic waves (or photons). Radiation requires no medium for its propagation, therefore, can take place also in vacuum. All matters emit radiation as long as they have a finite (greater than absolute zero) temperature.”

You really don’t have a clue, do you? You can’t describe the non-existent GHE, so you just try to deny, divert and confuse. Good luck with that.

A molecule converts photon energy into thermal energy which is then thermalized with the surrounding air molecules, and increases the rate of convection.. (i would point out here that increasing the rate of convection will increase the rate at which the surface cools..)

All of these molecules radiate in all directions…

“The effect works to separate warm and cool areas in the atmosphere.The troposphere warms while the stratosphere cools.”

How so? walk me through it.. start with a co2 molecule at the surface absorbing a photon from the surface if you will…

” This does not violate the 2LOT because work is being performed on the system. The atmosphere is not an isolated system.”

What work is being performed to force heat from a colder object to a warmer one? Please be specific

When the molecule “captures” a photon and begins vibrating the induced dipole moment may cause it to momentarily accelerate. It would thermalize with its surroundings if it imparts that newly acquired energy to its neighbors via collisions. Or it may relax the vibration and spawn a new photon. Whereas the original photon upwelling from the surface had an escape trajectory the new photon gets emitted in a random direction; half with upward trajectories and half with downward trajectories. The more CO2 molecules the higher the chance of thermalization and the higher the chance that an upwardly directed photon gets converted into a downwardly directed photon. The effect warms the environment below and cools it above. CO2 has an important molecular vibration mode that gets excited near wavenumber 667.

I’ve seen a few valid wordings of the 2LOT, but the ones I like the most are the ones that use the word “spontaneous”. The entropy of a system will increase (temperatures will homogenize) spontaneously if there are no external stimuli to influence the evolution of the system. But the atmosphere is far from being isolated or devoid of external stimuli. The Sun is injecting energy into it both at the top and indirectly from the bottom when the shortwave radiation gets converted into longwave radiation.

“Nobody pretends that a colder atmosphere can heat a warmer surface. Nobody”

lol. ok ill quote you eveytime I see someone do just that.

“If we now compare the actual Earth with an iceball lacking any H2O in whichever form (clouds, water vapor) but having by accident exactly the same albedo (0.3):

What does then happen, PhilJ?

Do you really want to go into fantasy atmospheres again? Wasn’t it you that last time called it ridiculous?

I’ll play, and I’ll use an observable atmosphere to answer. Far from being an iceball…

(Granted Venus is closer to the sun and still has some water left and its albedo is significantly higher…

I would suggest a planet at Earth distance from the sun with no water to cool its surface,and thus an atmosphere like Venus’ would be significantly hotter, certainly devoid of life and perhaps with no internal dynamo…

El Nino(s) still playing out appear to be in close correlation with water vapor and average global temperature. CO2 does not now, has never had, and will never have a significant effect on climate. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D2TdkhoVYAAd_g4.jpg

DP, I think you’re lost it by focusing on the noise, thus missing the warming. I ran the numbers for RSS TLT Global between Jan 2002 and Feb 2019 using a 5 month centered moving average, which gives data from Jan 2002 thru Dec 2018. I found a trend of 0.17 deg C per decade. So, where does that warming come from? Is there now more water vapor in the troposphere now compared with what was there in 2002 and if so, why?

Beautiful day here in Wasilla. Cold and clear or was. Now it’s haze from contrails. Good for a few millimeters I bet.

Anchorage an international airport and though many international jets bypass us now because of efficient jets it’s still good for emergency landings. Hence contrails now haze.

And to any brainiacs out there, why haven’t jet manufacturers included chutes or at least auto rotate. Seems like a plane in unrecoverable stall or nose dive to regain air flow, could with opposing rockets on wing ends?

ES,
Accounting for water vapor, solar effect as quantified by the time-integral of SSN anomalies and a simple approximation of SST cycles matches average global temperature 98.3% 1895-2018. This combined with 8 other compelling historical demonstrations produces the profound conclusion that GW is mostly (about 60%) natural with the rest due to increased water vapor from irrigation. The key is recognizing that CO2 in spite of being a ghg has little if any effect on climate. I give a rational explanation of how that can be in my analysis.

The water vapor increase is self-limiting and the trend was level 2002-2014 indicating that the self-limiting level has been reached. The aberration of El Nino action since then has caused a temporary WV and temperature increase. IMO when the el Ninos play out the WV and temperature will return to the 2002-2014 level.

SST and solar are in downtrend. WV has been pushed up by el Nino. Time will tell.

“Irrigation has a negligible effect on the global average radiative balance at the top of the atmosphere, but causes significant cooling of global average surface air temperatures over land and dampens regional warming trends.”

Sv,
I repeat. The warming was caused by increased water vapor. They (in your link) do not mention WV or even indicate that they are aware that WV is a ghg. WV increased 7% 1960-2002. WV increase correlated with irrigation increase. WV stopped increasing 2002-2014 and has been responding to el Nino since. WV is inherently self-limiting so GW will end (if it hasn’t already).

They do “mention WV” and “indicate that they are aware that WV is a ghg.

Fig. 3, TOA anomaly.

Fig. 7 Same as Fig. 6, but for net total radiation at the a top of the atmosphere and b surface, net shortwave radiation at the c top of the atmosphere and d surface, and net longwave radiation at the e top of the atmosphere and f surface

Ch. 1:
“Enhanced evapotranspiration from
irrigation can also increase atmospheric water vapor, with
potential consequences for the regional and global radiative
balance”

Ch. 4:
Any changes in net radiation must then come from
secondary effects (e.g., cloud cover changes, increased
atmospheric water vapor, etc.) which, as noted, were
small at the global scale.

WV on it’s own is completely unstable, an initial cooling gives more condensation and more cooling, or the other way around. It has increased because temperature increased first.

Sv,
Thanks for the comments. I did not previously notice that I was only looking at an abstract and your comments motivated tracking down the full report which I found a full copy of (no pay wall) with a Google search on the exact title: ,,Irrigation as an historical climate forcing,,

An interesting observation is that Fig 2, global irrigation, in that paper shows a similar slope change in about 1950 as Fig 3, TPW in my blog/analysis. This corroborates that WV increase correlates with irrigation increase as I had asserted in my blog/analysis based on Aquastat data. Fig 3.5 is from Aquastat.

Although water vapor is a ghg I do not think Figs 3 and 7, which address radiation, cloud cover and precipitation, are relevant and besides the graphs end nearly two decades ago. Note especially that Net Radiation (TOA) trend would be influenced only negligibly, if at all by WV.

The two examples you gave and another you did not demonstrate their awareness that WV is a ghg. However, I found no indication that they used any actual water vapor measurements which have been available for years. Particularly useful is the numerical global data available monthly from NASA/RSS that I use.

Apparently they were still hung up on the mistake that CO2 increase causes GW. Even by the time of their report, 2015, the separation between the rapidly rising CO2 and essentially flat average global temperature had become apparent.

“Increases in water vapour greenhouse effect are small because additional vapour cannot reach the upper troposphere, and greenhouse-gas warming is outweighed by increases in reflectance from humidity-induced low cloud cover, leading to a near-zero or small cooling effect. Near-surface temperature decreases over land are implied even without evaporative cooling at the surface, due to cooling by low clouds and vapour-induced changes to the moist lapse rate. These results indicate that even large increases in anthropogenic water vapour emissions would have negligible warming effects on climate, but that possible negative RF may deserve more attention.”

Maybe you could link to a paper which is not based on fantasy. You can no doubt link to any number of papers, all written by people in the grip of the same delusion.

So called “greenhouse gases” warm nothing. The idiots who couldn’t figure out how green- or hot- houses function, should be ashamed of themselves. Instead, they proclaimed themselves geniuses of the climatological variety, awarded themselves Nobel Prizes, and redefined fantasy to mean fact!

Sv,
It is unclear what you mean by ,,WV has reduced influence at the TOA,,. If by that you mean WV radiation to space is reduced because there are few WV molecules above the tropopause, your perception has been misled. The radiation from WV results from the population gradient of WV below about 10 km. Remember, radiation in the range wn 50-600 (WV) cannot be significantly absorbed/emitted by CO2. There is only a tiny amount of WV above the tropopause so most of the radiation in wn 50-600 that shows up at TOA has to have come all the from below the tropopause.

Note in Fig 0.5 the groove depth at 20 km is deeper than it is at 50 km. My explanation for this is that a small % of the radiation from below about 10 km is absorbed by the few WV molecules above 10 km, thermalized and some of this energy emitted from the much more plentiful CO2 molecules there instead of WV. So, if this slight reduction in emission from WV from the maximum at a lower level is what you mean, well OK.

The key is recognizing that CO2 in spite of being a ghg has little if any effect on climate. I give a rational explanation of how that can be in my analysis.

Allow me to repeat my question. Why is the trend in the RSS TLT from 2002 thru 2018 turn out to be 0.17 deg C per decade? Furthermore, why start with 2002, given that the RSS trend for Jan 2000 thru Dec 2018 is 0.19 deg C per decade? The RSS trend for the entire record is 0.20 deg C per decade, so your “slow down” may just be the result of your short sampling period. What’s the trend in TWP for your period, compared with that for the entire satellite era?

Your spaghetti graphs don’t give a proper comparison, since the end points do not appear to match. A 5 month centered moving average chops off 2 months on each end, so if you had used a centered average to maintain the proper timing, your graphs should end with December 2018. Your TPW graph doesn’t line up with the temperature graphs above. Where’s your test for correlation between the temperature series and the TWP series? Does the temperature lead the TWP or does it actually lag?

“Allow me to repeat my question. Why is the trend in the RSS TLT from 2002 thru 2018 turn out to be 0.17 deg C per decade? Furthermore, why start with 2002, given that the RSS trend for Jan 2000 thru Dec 2018 is 0.19 deg C per decade? The RSS trend for the entire record is 0.20 deg C per decade, so your “slow down” may just be the result of your short sampling period. What’s the trend in TWP for your period, compared with that for the entire satellite era?”

Who cares what the trend was? That is history, and no amount of intensive examination of past weather records will enable you to predict the future. Cheaper and easier to toss a coin, or make wild guess.

Repeat away. While you’re doing it, I’ll remind you what the the IPCC wrote –

“The climate system is a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.

Rather the focus must be upon the prediction of the probability distribution of the system s future possible states by the generation of ensembles of model solutions.”

Still does you no good at all. A fair coin has a 50-50 chance of a head. Go to a casino, and let me know how you go with your knowledge of ” . . .the probability distribution of the system s future possible states . . .”.

IMO it is a mistake to ignore the slope change 2002-2005 and include the aberration of the el Nino(s) after 2014. Just because a regression line is possible does not mean that it is meaningful. You must put what you see in context with understanding what caused the warming and I have ruled out CO2. What is left (except natural stuff) is WV and it is self-limiting.

DP, El Ninos aren’t “aberrations”, but appear to be one of the naturally occurring cycles within the atmosphere-ocean circulation system. As such, they can not be claimed to be not meaningful. This is just another reason to rely on long periods when assessing climate, with statistics over 30 years considered appropriate. Your blog post mentions such cycles, so I can’t see why you would think El Ninos to be aberrations.

I spent some more time looking at your blog post and noticed a problem. You discuss the wavelength determined transmission of the atmosphere, including the well known “window” between wave numbers of about 750 to 1250, a region which is transmitted directly to deep space, with the exception of ozone.

However, earlier in your post, you claimed that:

Radiation from the surface is very close to the Planck spectrum from a black body at the specified surface temperature. About 95% of thermal radiation from the surface is absorbed by ghg within the first meter; 99% within two meters.

The “atmospheric window” would allow the relatively warm emissions from the surface to flow directly out of the atmosphere with clear sky conditions, so this statement is wrong on it’s face. The GHGs will absorb in their respective emission bands, which will thermalize (i.e., warm) the air in the surface boundary layer, a process to which you do allude to. I don’t see where you discuss the fact that the GHGs at any altitude layer emit in all directions, with the net effect being that half the emissions go up and the other half go down. This fact relates to the repeated denial of the absorp_tion of the down welling flux by some around this blog, a flux which would be absorbed again by the surface if not by the GHGs in lower layers. For all I know, MODTRAN may include these processes in the calculations to arrive at your graphical results. I would think that each layer would include both absorp_tion, thermalization and then emission by each of the GHGs in that layer, so your notion that the WV would emit more than it absorbs in any layer seems flawed to me.

“The “atmospheric window” would allow the relatively warm emissions from the surface to flow
directly out of the atmosphere with clear sky conditions, so this statement is wrong on it’s
face.”

You have at least one minor problem.

With clear sky conditions in the arid desert for example, the relatively warm emissions from
the surface do flow directly out of the atmosphere, it seems. Shortly after the sun passes the
zenith, the temperature of the surface starts to fall. As the sun sets, the temperature falls
very quickly. For thousand of years, people used their knowledge of basic physics to make ice
in the hottest deserts. No GHE, no heating.

Even after four and a half billion years of sunlight and CO2, the surface still manages to cool
at night – no heat trapping to be seen!

Carry on dreaming. Maybe you are confused by sunlight making the surface warmer each day?

Try coming up with a GHE which increases the temperature of the surface at night. Not cooling
of any sort – slow or fast – that is still cooling. You can’t of course, and neither can the rest
of the bumblers calling themselves climatologists.

ES,
Thanks for actually reading it. Re the 95%, of course I was only referring to the radiation that does get absorbed so will change that to read ,,About 95% of thermal radiation that is absorbed from the surface, is absorbed by ghg ,,

I assumed that everyone knowledgeable on this subject new that radiation is in all directions with the net effect that half go up and half go down. The key to the net flux being up is the steep gradient in WV (especially below about 10 km) so path length (average distance between emitting molecule and absorbing molecule) up is longer than path length down. In fact, nearly all of the radiation from WV molecules below about 10 km gets all the way to space.

I discuss some issues with MODTRAN6 below about 10 km but above that did not appear to me to be obviously wrong. I have seen a TOA comparison with measured that showed good agreement.

The notch(es) in TOA graphs of radiation flux vs wavenumber are important clues as to what is going on. The energy that did not get radiated in the wn range 600-750 (the CO2 notch) had to get radiated at other wn. The only other possible emitter is WV. Emission results from the thermalized energy, i.e. temperature of the gas (at that altitude). There is a lot more in Section 5 of my blog/analysis.

MF,
You just gave half of a simple demonstration of GHE. Ice can be made at night in the desert (shallow pan insulated from the ground with straw) because the low humidity means low GHE so less impedance to radiation to space. It does not work where WV is high because high WV means lots of GHE impeding radiation to space.

This is also a demonstration of thermalization as pointed out in the last paragraph of Section 4.

No, I gave a simple example of basic physics. Nobody has described, or can describe, the mythical GHE, certainly not if it claims that increasing the amount of GHGs between the Sun and a thermometer is supposed to make the thermometer hotter

Generally, GHE supporters say they are saying something totally different, but cannot quite figure out what it is. Hopefully, you agree that this not a satisfactory state of affairs.

If nobody can actually describe this GHE in any fashion that would allow someone to propose a testable hypothesis to explain it, then whatever it is – it ain’t science.

I agree with the words of Richard Feynman – “It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.”

Claiming that your theory is so amazingly brilliant that no experiment is possible, is just silly.

The energy that did not get radiated in the wn range 600-750 (the CO2 notch) had to get radiated at other wn. The only other possible emitter is WV. Emission results from the thermalized energy, i.e. temperature of the gas (at that altitude).

Regarding the CO2 “notch”, the depth of the dip aligns with the effective black body emission temperature of the gas column, IMHO. That is to say, the temperature at an altitude/pressure height from which the emissions occur, which I understand to be above the tropopause. Above the tropopause, there’s almost no WV, thus the thermal radiation cooling can only occur via the other GHGs. But, below the tropopause, the vertical energy transfer is a mix of radiation and convective pathways, thus the GHG pathway must still remove the sum total of the added sensible energy crossing that region of the atmosphere without the WV mode. The process is complex and focusing only on one component won’t give the right result, IMHO. This is not a new problem and you must contend with the decades of underlying analytical work, such as Ramanathan and Coakley (1978) if you want your approach to be accepted.

Another issue with your WV and irrigation claims. Irrigation occurs during the summer growing season(s) and the added water rains out rapidly, but the greatest warming appears to be evident in the late Fall/early Winter months in the temperate latitudes. At Arctic latitudes where there’s no irrigation, the greatest warming also appears to be during the Winter months.

ES,
Fig 1.5 in my b/a looks useful for this discussion. It shows the bottom of the notch aligning with the -50 C BB line which is consistent with CO2 radiating to space at the tropopause and, in fact, the spike centered at wn 667 represents CO2 emission at even higher altitudes where there is negligible pressure broadening. IMO we see this in pretty much the same way.

But notice also the radiation at wn 100-600. It does not follow a BB line and some of the radiation looks to be from quite low altitude (warmer) making it all the way to space. Also, the breadth of the hash means radiation from a broad range of altitudes (temperatures) makes it all the way to space. Of course vertical convection and latent heat are part of the energy mix below the tropopause, perhaps more WV speeds it up partially compensating for the added ghg effect from added WV. About 3/4 of the absorbed energy is radiated all the way to space by WV from below the tropopause. It happens because of the huge population gradient of WV from average about 10,000 ppm at sea level to about 32 ppm at about 10 km.

The ordinate of Fig 1.5 is power (W/m^2) and for any time passage, proportional to energy which must be conserved. The energy missing from the notch has to be radiated to space by WV.

I am aware of the energy mix below the tropopause and make a stab at quantifying it at Fig 0.7. I have no interest in the mix beyond what I have already done.

I am trying to understand what Mother Nature is doing. It is not clear that all others have the same objective. In Section 2 I list eight compelling examples demonstrating that CO2 has little if any effect on climate. What works is WV (combined with two other factors).

WV is not my claim; it is what NASA/RSS report. Your comments suggest that you do not believe them. Their report agrees acceptably with NCEP1 and NCEP2. The only irrigation claim that I have made is noticing that the rate increase in about 1950 correlates with the rate increase in WV in about 1950. A study in Section 9 shows where the WV comes from (about 86% irrigation).

ES,
The graph at https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D2TdkhoVYAAd_g4.jpg is merely an EXCEL plot of the reported numerical data with dates aligned. The smoothing is a bit misleading because its . . . smoother but without smoothing was not readable. With 5-point smoothing the second from last plotted point is the average of the last 4 data points and the last plotted point is the average of the last 3 data points. Better than nothing but be aware.

bdgwx: ‘When oceanographers uses terms like acidification and phrases like becoming more acidic they only mean that the pH is decreasing.’ – then why don’t they say that pH values are decreasing instead of using misleading terminology? I spent a working lifetime in laboratory science in the UK, and never in all those years did I see ‘acidification’ used in the way that
the so-called climate scientists are doing.
You say that ‘Computing a mean from data with variability isn’t nonsense. People do it all of the time. In fact, it’s ubiquitous in pretty much all disciplines of science. What are you thinking the issue is here?’
As you saw earlier, the underlying causes of pH variations differ. How can you possibly justifying lumping pH values together, and then claim that anthropogenic CO2 is the cause of an alleged minor decrease? At a tangent, where is the laboratory experiment under controlled conditions which demonstrates conclusively what pH changes occur in seawater when CO2 is increased by increments of parts per million? If you know of such an experiment, please supply me with a reference. I’d be very interested. There’s no excuse for failing to conduct such an experiment
Then of course there is the blatant and deliberately misleading claim that ‘ocean acidity has increased by 30%’ – this borders on downright dishonesty, yet the media and politicians believe it. It is, of course, a sleight of hand, a fiddle using the pH scale with which to terrify the public. An absolute disgrace.

I don’t know why oceanographers adopted the term acidification to mean a decrease in pH or a movement along the scale toward the acid side. Though I did find the following link to be insightful and does provide clues as to why it might have been chosen. Which term would you like to see used instead?

Why would the details that cause variability in a dataset prevent someone from computing the mean of that dataset?

The global mean pH is interesting because it provides a single metric by which to make a falsification attempt at the hypothesis that the oceans have net uptake of CO2. Ya know…all other things being if the oceans were the source of the increase in atmospheric CO2 concentrations then you would expect oceanic pH to increase.

bdgwx: The NOAA link typifies exactly the points I made earlier, so I’ve nothing to add to those comments. The first use of the term ‘ocean acidification’ was a paper by Ken Caldeira and Michael E. Wickett in Nature volume 425, page 365 (25 September 2003) entitled Oceanography: Anthropogenic carbon and ocean pH. The cynic in me notes that this notion of ‘ocean acidification’ came from America – where all the good scares begin.
I repeat, the vertical distribution of pH is not uniform throughout the oceans. The principal cause of these geographical pH variations is the non-uniform distribution of the CO2 concentration resulting from the lower solubility of CO2 gas at higher temperatures, basin-wide patterns of subsurface biological oxidation of organic matter and dissolution of carbonate minerals, and upwelling of CO2-rich deep water or downwelling of CO2-poor surface water (Sarmiento and Gruber, 2006). Upwelling around the equator increases CO2 concentration near the surface at low latitudes compared to values in mid latitudes. An increase in surface CO2 is also seen at high latitudes caused by the high solubility of CO2 in cold water. High concentrations in deeper water result from oxidation of organic matter.
Then there’s this from the World Meteorological Organisation, bulletin Vol 64 (1) 2015: ‘Anthropogenic CO2 reacts with water to form an acid.’ Not in a buffered solution it doesn’t – the whole point of a buffer is that it resists changes in pH, and sea water is a buffer! Also, there’s no difference in the reactivity of CO2 from any source – still, we’ve got to get the word ‘anthropogenic’ in, haven’t we?
Further into the article, the WMO refers to ocean pH measurements during the previous 10 years. It states that ‘ocean surface pH has decreased during the period of observations at an average rate of -0.0013 per year to -0.0024 per year, depending on the location.’ Note the words ‘depending on the location.’
We also have ‘The rate of these changes depends not only on the chemistry, but also on other, both physical and biological, factors particular to each region The sub-polar time-series displayed some of the highest temporal variability, caused in part by the large seasonal differences in temperature and biological productivity.’
To talk about an average global oceanic pH reduction of 0.1 is clearly nonsensical and misleading. Still, it makes a good scary story for the media and public, doesn’t it?

Are you saying that you have found the missing testable GHE hypothesis? Or the impossible description of the GHE? Are you saying that reducing the amount of radiation reaching the Earths surface makes the surface hotter?

Some people might think I am a little harsh when referring to people such as Gavin Schmidt. Here’s an opinion from a real particle physicist –

“Gavin Schmidt and everyone else who tries to paint hysterical climatology as a hard science analogous to particle physics is simply lying. Particle physics is a hard science and “five sigma proofs” are possible in it, climatology is a soft science and “five sigma proofs” in it are just marketing scams, and cosmology is somewhere in between. We all hope that cosmology will return closer to particle physics but we can’t be sure.”

Others may agree or disagree. In addition –

“The motto of the Royal Society is nullius in verba — “on no one’s word” — which is intended to capture the “determination of Fellows to withstand the domination of authority and to verify all statements by an appeal to facts determined by experiment.”

Compare this with the lunatic lurchings of self-proclaimed hysterical climatologists.

Computer models are not experiments. Assertions are not experiments. “Evidence” is not experiment.

The experiment is under way. We have added 130ppm of CO2 to the atmosphere and measured changes in radiation, sea level, temperature and climate which match our expectations from theory and the lab.”

If you could actually quote me “moaning”, somebody might believe you are complaining about something I wrote, rather than something you are trying to complain about.

As to rest of yours pseudoscientific wishful thinking, your expectations are obviously fantasy, based on nothing at all, beyond the delusional ramblings of a few fumbling bumblers. You have no theory. Not even a testable GHE hypothesis! “The lab” of which you speak does not exist. Nobody has ever shown that increasing the amount of CO2 between the sun and a thermometer makes the thermometer hotter.

The Earth’s surface temperature has decreased since it was molten. That is called cooling by scientists and rational people.

It would be typical of pseudoscientific dimwits to claim that because an “experiment” has been started, recording its outcome is unnecessary – the results have been decide in advance. Why let facts intrude on pseudoscientific fantasy? Four and a half billion years of cooling has no impact on you, does it?

Note that I refuse to obey your command to cease doing something I haven’t been doing. Be as stupid and ignorant as you like. Feel free to blame me for letting others know that you are stupid and ignorant.

We haven’t added 130ppm to the atmosphere. We’ve added 16ppm to the atmosphere. You proved it with your mass balance. All the changes you describe above are natural variability and the temperatures we see today are unremarkable.

You can say what you want E-man and bring up rebuttals from Skeptical Science where the logic does not follow. These numbers I’m using are not controversial about anthropogenic and natural emission. These are numbers the IPCC and the various sources are using all over the place-roughly 8GTC anthropogenic and 210GTC natural. And, also Cawley uses that number of 4 years residence time in his paper. I came up with that on my own-it’s just simple math. Also, skeptical science’s assumption that sinks are greater than emissions just doesn’t stand up to what we’re observing. Sinks are proportional to concentration in the atmosphere because of ideal gas law so sinks are going up too. That’s what we’re observing. But, whatever the sinks are, whether they are more or less than emissions, equilibrium anthropogenic can’t be more than about four percent of emissions-mathematically impossible.

I think you may still be confused regarding the difference between the residence time of a molecule and the lifetime for the concentration increase for a pulse of CO2. The two are very different concepts.

Consider, hypothetically speaking, that you could somehow tag anthroprogenic molecules so that you could track them exactly and that you pulse 280 ppm instantly to increase the concentration from 280 to 560 ppm. What you would have after the initial pulse is 50% contain your tag. After about 5 years half of those tagged molecules get exchanged for untagged molecules. The ratio of tagged-to-untagged drops from 1:2 to 1:4. Wait another 10 years or 2 halvings and you drop to 1:8 and then 1:16.

However, and this is crucial, the ppm doesn’t drop much at all if any. What is happening is that the carbon cycle is recycling molecules constantly. Those tagged molecules didn’t just drop out of the cycle. They merely got exchanged 1-for-1 with an untagged molecule. The ratio of tagged-to-untagged would be a metric that tracks the residence time of individual molecules while the ppm would be a metric that tracks the lifetime of the concentration increase for a pulse of molecules.

The real world is slightly more complicated in that natural sources and sinks adjust to the pulse and because the pulse isn’t instantaneous. For example, a pulse of CO2 causes natural sinks to increase slightly in a half-hearted attempt to buffer the imbalance. Anthroprogenic molecules also don’t come with a perfect tagging mechanism. However, there are subtle isotopic characteristics that are different and with some clever analysis scientists can effectively track the anthroprogenic to nonanthroprogenic ratio in the atmosphere.

No, no I’m not getting it confused. The residence time is an average of all the molecules. I know some CO2 molecules might have “life times” of two minutes and some molecules might have lifetimes of two centuries. But residence time is the average of all the CO2 molecules in the atmosphere. The residence time is the average of how long all CO2 molecules averaged together spend in the atmosphere. I understand if you get a pulse it could theoretically distort your calculation but even with a pulse the residence time is still 4 years.

Right. The residence of the molecules isn’t the issue though. I think everyone is in agreement that the average amount of time it takes for a specific molecule to leave the atmosphere is on the order of years. This is different than the amount of time it takes for the concentration to deplete to pre-pulse levels.

I think you’re getting resdidence time confused with half life. I’m trying to show you in the example above and you’re not following me. Residence time is the time it takes for level to approach its equilibrium level when emission is constant. Like in the example above we’re emitting one molecule per year so emission is constant-I’m starting at time zero so you can see. We can say dr/dt=(Re-R)/a. (a) or alpha is the equilibrium time or the residence time. Re-R is the difference between the equilibrium concentration and some concentration. It is is not half life. From this it would follow that residence time would be equilibrium level divided by emissions. You need to read Salby’s book.

What I find funny about E-man is he does a mass balance above that is probably pretty accurate but then he realizes it supports my argument so he puts up this BS article by Skeptical Science that is purposely vague and illogical that supposedly falsifies Salby. It doesn’t.

BGDWX,
What you are describing is not evident by real world data. We see real world that emissions are approximately 100ppm and equlibrium is approximately 400ppm. This gives us a residence time of 4 years. Therefore anthropogenic CO2 which is 4% of emissions CANNOT be more than 4% of equilibrium level of 400ppm. Anthropgenic CO2 in the atmosphere is around 16ppm. Therefore man CANNOT be causing the warming. QED.

SAP, I totally get what you are saying. And it is absolutely correct. Everyone is in agreement that if we could tag every anthroprogenic molecule with a special marker we would find that < 4% of the molecules in the atmosphere had the tag. That's not the issue.

The issue is that the ppm continues to increase. It is increasing because anthroprogenic emissions have unbalanced the sources and sinks. Remove the anthroprogenic emissions and the ppm stops increasing and the percent of anthroprogenic molecules drops to 0 rather quickly. But the ppm still holds steady. The cause of the increase in ppm is entirely the result of anthroprogenic emissions even though none of those anthroprogenic molecules are still in the atmosphere.

I want you to play this out in Excel. Let each row represent a full year. Start at 400 ppm. Pulse 100 ppm natural, 4 ppm anthroprogenic, and deplete 100 ppm of randomly selected molecules each year. Remember natural sinks are not preferential to how those molecules got into the atmosphere so it's a random selection. This is an imbalance of +4 ppm/yr. When you do this you'll see that the percent of anthroprogenic molecules increases rapidly from 0% to slightly less than 4%. But all the while the ppm is still increasing and it's 100% the result of the anthroprogenic emissions even though the anthroprogenic percent in the atmosphere never exceeds 4% in any given year.

In reality our 4 ppm/yr of emissions has caused natural sinks to increase by 2 ppm/yr which makes the final imbalance closer to +2 ppm/yr. Once you've got the model above working in Excel use the slightly higher sink rate and watch what happens. The effect is similar, but has a seemingly paradoxical behavior with the percent of anthroprogenic molecules in the atmosphere at any given time. What you'll see is that the percent increases rapidly up to about 3.5% and then gradually dies off with exponential decay.

BDGWX,
But that’s not what is happening and that model doesn’t describe our world. Sinks increase in proportion to the level of CO2 in the atmosphere based on the ideal gas law. Since we know residence time is roughly 4 years we know any change in emission will reach an equilibrium level in 4 years. So we know that if the emission rate changed from say 100 to 102ppm per year, within 4 years sinks would also equal 102ppm. It isn’t a permanent imbalance. Because of this Salby even gives a fudge factor and says residence time is less than 10 years. He won’t say it is 4 years but that’s what it is. Salby even gives larger fudges for instance that 30% of the equilibrium level is anthropogenic. But, still that tells us that 70% of the increase has been natural. This tells us CO2 changes with respect to temperature. We need to move on to some other goblin. CO2 isn’t it.

Let’s do a thought experiment BGDWX. Suppose back in 1750 pre industrial revolution when equilibrium level was approximately 250ppm and natural emissions were roughly 62.5ppm. The industrial revolution starts but instead of slowly ramping up, anthropogenic emission matches natural emission of 62.5ppm. This is roughly 15 times what it is now. But it doesn’t change for 250 years. In the year 2000 it is still 62.5ppm-15 times what it is now. What would be the equilibrium level today, what percentage of the increase would be due to man, and what percentage of the CO2 would be anthropogenic?

So natural sources is 62.5 ppm/yr and natural sinks are 62.5 ppm/yr and we are in equilibrium at 250 ppm. Then a new source of 62.5 ppm/yr is added. Sources now total 125 ppm/yr. And this goes on for 250 years. Correct? What are sinks doing at this period? Do they stay locked in at 62.5 ppm/yr or do they also increase to try and buffer the new source?

So if the roughly 260 ppm of carbon equivalent CO2 that has been emitted by humans ended up in sinks and not the atmosphere then we need find another 130 ppm of natural sources to account for the 130 ppm increase in the atmosphere. What would this new source be?

And yet, he cant actually say what the GHE is, or how it works. He claims to know everything about it, but not what it is.

The Suns output doesn’t seem to be increasing. The pseudoscientific cultists obviously believe the Earth is heating up due to climatological magic. No additional energy is created by the miraculous GHE, but the Earth has decide to heat up anyway – except over the last four and a half billion years, every night, every winter, and when it is cloudy, raining, or if you step into the shade.

The GHE has been explained many times already. Dr. Spencer even has a blog post on it. In a nutshell what happens is that some polyatomic molecules allow shortwave photons to mostly pass through thus allowing energy to penetrate to the surface. But the resultant longwave photons upwelling from the surface are “captured” via a molecular vibration process. The quantized energy of the photon can be converted into thermal energy directly when the molecule thermalizes with the environment as part of molecular collisions or it can relax its vibrational state and spawn a new photon that shoots off in a random direction. Whereas the original photon had an escape trajectory there is a now only a 50% probability that the new one will continue on the same escape trajectory. Half of the newly spawned photons from this process will have downward trajectories. CO2 has an important vibrational mode centered at wavenumber 667 which is crucial for how this plays out in Earth’s atmosphere.

No, the Greenhouse effect has not been described anywhere. Appealing to Dr Spencer’s authority won’t help. Your “nutshell” makes no sense at all. How has the Earth managed to cool over the last four and ahalf billion years? What happens to your pseudoscientific nonsense at night?

Spouting meaningless garbage “quantized energy of the photon” wont help either. A photon can have any energy at all. You have been misreading Wikipedia again. As for The “quantized energy of the photon can be converted into thermal energy directly when the molecule thermalizes with the environment as part of molecular collisions or it can relax its vibrational state and spawn a new photon that shoots off in a random direction.”, you seem to creating your own jargon as you go.

Unfortunately, it turns out that photons from a colder body (the atmosphere in this case), stubbornly refuse to heat the warmer body which emitted them (the surface). This effect is noticed at night – and over the last four and a half billion years on the Earth’s surface.

Here is what some idiot at NASA claims –

“As you might expect from the name, the greenhouse effect works … like a greenhouse! A greenhouse is a building with glass walls and a glass roof. Greenhouses are used to grow plants, such as tomatoes and tropical flowers.

A greenhouse stays warm inside, even during the winter. In the daytime, sunlight shines into the greenhouse and warms the plants and air inside. At nighttime, it’s colder outside, but the greenhouse stays pretty warm inside. That’s because the glass walls of the greenhouse trap the Sun’s heat.”

Gee. A greenhouse stays warm inside, even during the winter! No, it doesn’t. Have you a different explanation for the Greenhouse Effect, or do you like another nasa.gov version? This states –

“Most climate scientists agree the main cause of the current global warming trend is human expansion of the “greenhouse effect”1 — warming that results when the atmosphere traps heat radiating from Earth toward space.

Certain gases in the atmosphere block heat from escaping. Long-lived gases that remain semi-permanently in the atmosphere and do not respond physically or chemically to changes in temperature are described as “forcing” climate change. Gases, such as water vapor, which respond physically or chemically to changes in temperature are seen as “feedbacks.”

Unfortunately, the IPCC reference used to support this rubbish doesn’t actually contain the words “greenhouse effect” anywhere at all. Intentional deception or sloppiness? Who knows?

Maybe you could fly off into some other sciencey garbage. A testable GHE hypothesis would be more acceptable to real scientists.

Gee. A greenhouse stays warm inside, even during the winter! No, it doesnt.

For a real greenhouse at temperate latitudes in winter, the average temperature inside will be higher than the average temperature outside, capturing some of the reduced solar energy in winter. That result is the combination of convective blocking and the fact that glass is a good absorber/emitter of thermal IR EM energy. That’s also how passive solar thermal collectors used for home heating work in winter, a well proven fact. Get a clue, won’t you please?

E.Swanson: It seems that you aren’t a gardener. Have a look on the internet and you’ll see numerous advertisements for greenhouse heaters. I don’t know where you live, but rest assured that in the UK such heaters are vital because greenhouses are very cold inside at night during winter.
MF refers to ‘some idiot at NASA’ who claims that ‘at nighttime, it’s colder outside, but the greenhouse stays pretty warm inside.’ MF’s assessment of the author is correct.

For a real greenhouse at temperate latitudes in winter, the average temperature inside will be higher than the average temperature outside, capturing some of the reduced solar energy in winter.

I didn’t claim that the temperature inside would be tropical or feel warm to a human or even above freezing. Just that the temperature would be warmer than outside. Of course, modern greenhouses might use double or triple layer polycarbonate glazing, which increases the insulation effect compared with single glazed glass. Furthermore, the glazing would need to be placed at a greater angle for maximum winter warmth and the north side in the NH would need to be insulated rather well. Proper design is required to optimize winter performance.

E.Swanson: Look it up for yourself, under NASA’s ‘Climate Kids’ heading. They state:
‘A greenhouse stays warm inside, even during the winter. In the daytime, sunlight shines into the greenhouse and warms the plants and air inside. At nighttime, it’s colder outside, but the greenhouse stays pretty warm inside. That’s because the glass walls of the greenhouse trap the Sun’s heat.’
MF is correct.

I believe I comprehended what you wrote. You were attempting to justify NASA’s stupid greenhouse statements. NASA specifically referred to the greenhouse staying warmer at night – presumably warmer than a non-greenhouse, but not specifically stated as is the usual practice of pseudo-scientific fools and frauds.

Your attempt to divert into the other diversion beloved of pseudoscience, the “average”, is quite pointless.

The fact is that there is no greenhouse effect, and NASA demonstrates it has no clue about how a real greenhouse operates. Nor do you.

Put your Bell jar outside in winter. Keep the best vacuum you can get – don’t want that nasty old air mucking up the results, do you? Tell me how much warmer the interior is, compared with the external glass surface, just before dawn. No warming there. Do you think that inserting multitudes of multicoloured plates might help? No? Why might that be?

Your Bell jar (and its contents) are continuously exposed to radiation of more than 300 W/m2, by your accounts. Why do you need an extra heat source? Does the stupid green/blue plate nonsense only work when the sun is shining (or there is a similar type of directional heat source involved), perhaps?

You cannot even define the GHE yourself, and you cannot find anyone who has. Carry on claiming that fantasy is fact.

Your Bell jar (and its contents) are continuously exposed to radiation of more than 300 W/m2, by your accounts. Why do you need an extra heat source? Does the stupid green/blue plate nonsense only work when the sun is shining (or there is a similar type of directional heat source involved), perhaps?

When simulating the Earth’s energy balance, one can assume that the surface receives a continual energy input, perhaps 1/4 the direct beam rate. that assumption is not precisely correct, but it’s a good first approximation. Similarly, my Green Plate demo uses a constant input as well, as is used in Eli Rabitt’s simple math model. Day vs night heating is thus no longer part of the problem. The outgoing thermal IR EM energy operates both day and night.

Hang on there a moment! A block of ice, emitting 300 W/m2 is greater than your “average” of the “direct beam rate”. That’s only 250 W/m2, and 300 W/m2 is greater.

Maybe you think 250 is greater than 300, and maybe you think that the Earth hasn’t cooled for the last four and a half billion years or so. So much for averages, and so much for pseudo-scientific nonsense about energy balance.

If you think that day vs night heating is irrelevant, why do you object to using a block of ice in lieu of your heat lamp? Having to face reality is inconvenient for the delusional pseudo-scientist, I know, but somebody has to do it, eh?

Don’t you think it is interesting that neither simulations nor Eli Rabbet’s “simple math model” (also known as “complete BS”), are in any way related to reality? Try to define the GHE, and you will see what I mean. Or you can just keep devouring pap designed to feed the slack-jawed mentally deficient GHE true believers.

MF, Yes, an ice block would be expected to emit thermal IR EM of 300 W/m^2 at a temperature of 273K. But, you continue to ignore the surrounding environment and it’s impact on the situation. If the surroundings are at a temperature above freezing, the ice block would receive more energy than it emits and melting would occur. Conversely, if the surroundings were below the temperature of the ice block, the ice block would cool to a lower temperature as it radiates more energy than it receives.

I didn’t claim that day vs. night heating is irrelevant, far from it. I pointed out that averaging the daily heat input from the sun could be modeled as a constant rate based on the average. Then too, you seem to ignore the effects of thermal mass, which stores thermal energy during the day and releases it at night, which smooths the temperature variations over the 24 hours.

As for using a block of ice for a heat source, I would need to keep the temperature of the ice block below the freezing point and also keep it from evaporating, which would spoil any effort to maintain a high vacuum. Your objection is just another red herring, since achieving a reasonable test, such as within the bell jar of my Green Plate demo, would be difficult or impossible on it’s face. That said, there are other ways to demonstrate the Green Plate Effect using ice, which I’m working on at present. Don’t forget, I wasn’t trying to “prove” the GHE, only demonstrate that back radiation moves energy from a colder solid body to a warmer one under certain conditions, as predicted by standard engineering and scientific test and theory, which do not violate the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.

With you final point:

Try to define the GHE, and you will see what I mean. Or you can just keep devouring pap designed to feed the slack-jawed mentally deficient GHE true believers.

you apparently indicate that you think the US Air Force is totally incompetent with their decades of scientific investigations which resulted in the MODTRAN program. I hope your “side” (where ever that may be) is never on the receiving end or their lethal potential based on such studies.

Maybe you could quote what I wrote, rather than complain about what I didn’t.

You wrote –

“I didn’t claim that day vs. night heating is irrelevant, far from it. I pointed out that averaging the daily heat input from the sun could be modeled as a constant rate based on the average. Then too, you seem to ignore the effects of thermal mass, which stores thermal energy during the day and releases it at night, which smooths the temperature variations over the 24 hours.”

Your averaging is pointless, if you refuse to use an actual average input (300 W/m2) rather than a modelled input of less than this. You could be accused of deviousness, and misdirection. I did not ignore effects of thermal mass. You have introduced this diversion, presumably as an afterthought, when I pointed out that you are stupid and ignorant if you believe a body can retain heat it received from the Sun when allowed to radiate that heat away for eighteen hours or so after the Sun reaches its zenith.

Baron Fourier was right. I am right. Nature is right. You are wrong.

You wrote –

“Don’t forget, I wasn’t trying to “prove” the GHE, only demonstrate that back radiation moves energy from a colder solid body to a warmer one under certain conditions, as predicted by standard engineering and scientific test and theory, which do not violate the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.”

You are wasting your time telling what not to forget – I’ll forget what I wish, when I wish! (Only joking.)

You don’t mention trying to define the GHE. I don’t blame you – you cannot do it. Nor can anyone else. As to mythical “back radiation”, maybe you could try to convince others without resorting to stupid pseudo-scientific jargon. What’s wrong with using terms generally accepted by real physicists?

Thanks for quoting me, anyway. Your comment seems quite irrelevant – if the US Air Force is totally incompetent, so be it. You said it, not me. Not a terribly effective appeal to authority. Here’s a quick insight –

“When U.S. air force discovered the flaw of averages.” Follow it up if you wish.

The USAF has also managed to accidentally kill 133 of its pilots or crew 2013 – 2017. Do you think these deaths could have been avoided by more intensive use of MODTRAN, or other research? Why involve the USAF anyway? Am I supposed to quake in my boots?

I’m not terrified of motor vehicles, and I am far more likely to die from a motor vehicle accident than the “lethal potential” of the USAF.

Carry on with your silliness. The Clausius statement may assist –

“Heat can never pass from a colder to a warmer body without some other change, connected therewith, occurring at the same time.”

swannie…”If the surroundings are at a temperature above freezing, the ice block would receive more energy than it emits and melting would occur”.

You need to study how atoms absorb/emit the energy to which you refer. It is actually electromagnetic energy and it is emitted and absorbed only by electrons in atoms. There is nothing else in an atom or a molecule (which is two or more atoms bonded together by electrons or electron-induced charges), that can absorb or emit EM.

The melting or freezing of ice/water has nothing to do with a net balance of energy. To see that, you have to understand how molecules of water form. The molecule is comprised of two hydrogen atoms bonded to an oxygen atom by electrons. Because the O2 atom has a much larger negative charge, it bends the bonds into an angle of about 105 degrees.

Because the O2 end is more negative, it polarizes the molecule so it has a negative end and a not so negative end, which means the hydrogen ends are positive wrt to the O2 end. Due to that polarity, the water molecules can bind to each other, negative to positive, in what is called a hydrogen bond.

As water loses heat, the energy in the electrons drop and the charge polarity changes so the molecules bond together in a crystal at 4 places rather than three.

If you want to reverse that process, you add heat. Then the electrons gain more energy, breaking the weaker crystal bonds, and former the slightly stronger hydrogen bonds described earlier.

As those electrons lose or absorb heat, they move to different energy orbitals, and they are emitting and absorbing EM at different frequencies. Therefore, electrons in ice radiating at a lower frequency and intensity cannot form a net energy balance with water or the environment.

It’s simply a matter of state. The electrons in ice are in a state that corresponds to the energy they have in an ice crystal lattice. They are not exchanging energy with the environment, it is a one-way process, from the hotter environment to colder ice.

When ice emits the alleged 300 W/m^2, what is there to absorb it, except something even colder? A hotter environment certainly won’t absorb it, especially when it is 99% nitrogen and oxygen. Therefore, there is no net transfer of energy.

When SW solar energy strikes the Earth’s surface, the electrons in the surface material absorb the SW, become excited, and rise to a higher energy level. However, the EM they emit is of a much lower frequency than the SW and have a fraction of the intensity. That’s because the natural frequency of electrons in surface material at terrestrial temperatures is much lower than that of SW solar energy.

There is no net energy balance between the surface and the Sun, emission from the surface is an entirely different process than the SW emitted from the Sun.

This nonsense about energy budgets is pseudo-science. On the surface, electrons at terrestrial temperatures serve as energy converters, they absorb energy at a higher frequency and intensity and re-emit it at a lower frequency and intensity (IR).

This is about the chemistry of atomic structure, not about the human fantasy of budgets. The electrons absorbing and emitting the EM don’t give a hoot about GHGs in the atmosphere. They could not care less about a net energy balance.

All an electron can do is change energy levels to reflect received or emitted energy. The balance of which you speak is about the number of electrons at different energy levels. Since they cannot reside in two places at one time, they cannot emit and absorb at the same time. Ergo, there is no relationship between the emission from ice and the emissions from a hotter environment.

I am surprised you do not know how infrared radiometers work, nor how satellites are able to detect water vapour in the atmosphere. I would be happy to provide the information which would obviate your ignorance.

However, before I do so, please show me evidence of any efforts you have made to help yourself to learn about the things you claim not to know.

I believe you will learn more if you exert a little personal effort. I am not a fan of spoon feeding the self proclaimed stupid and ignorant, such as yourself.

If you really cannot find answers (after demonstrating you have made a sustained and sincere effort), I am here to help.

Dr Roy’s Emergency Moderation Team: What’s going on is the same as always – a lively and entertaining discussion of different points of view!
Yes, things do go off topic and can get a bit heated at times, but that’s because people pick up on all sorts of matters that get mentioned.

@Carbon500: I disagree with your assertion that it’s only “at times” that these threads derail. The amount of non sequitur, gerrymandering, and ad hominem “off topic” comments is usually quite epic. It’s common for the trolls–and trolls of trolls–to routinely tie up thread space “/telling me more and more/About some useless information/Supposed to fire my imagination/”. It’s tiresome to wade through the unsupported opinion pieces and slanderous reparte to find comments relevant to the original Dr. Spencer post! I realize this post in and of itself contributes to the very issue at hand, but maybe it’ll raise awareness among the more frequent offenders.

The question was “Is Satellite Altimeter-based Sea Level Rise Acceleration from a Biased Water Vapor Correction?”

Then Dr Spencer published this.

“UPDATE: A day after posting this, I did a rough calculation of how large the error in altimeter-based sea level rise could possibly be. The altimeter correction made for water vapor is about 6 mm in sea level height for every 1 mm increase in tropospheric water vapor. The trend in oceanic water vapor over 1993-2018 has been 0.48 mm/decade, which would require about [6.1 x 0.48=] ~3 mm/decade adjustment from increasing vapor. This can be compared to the total sea level rise over this period of 33 mm/decade. So it appears that even if the entire water vapor correction were removed, its impact on the sea level trend would reduce it by only about 10%.”

So the answer to the question was “probably not.”

Respect to Dr Spencer for his answer, but it killed any discussion of the original topic and we moved on to other things.

The linked article makes this incorrect assertion:
,,… rise in atmospheric concentration [of CO2]…is instead caused by an environmental response to rising atmospheric temperature…,,
Anyone with adequate science knowledge knows that the fraction of CO2 in the atmosphere does not depend on ATMOSPHERIC temperature.

Ent,
I have never seen anything re CO2 and snowball earth. The common sense of all history is that CO2 has no significant effect on climate. The occasional times when CO2 and T move together are mere coincidence. I list 8 compelling examples that CO2 has little if any effect on climate in Section 2 of my b/a.

Volcano activity is fairly steady with most events short lived. I found no consistent effect on temperature. An exception was the 10X size Tambora eruption in 1815 (Section 19) which led to 1816 which has been referred to as the year without a summer.

It also shows a misunderstanding of what ‘residence time’ is. It refers to the average life of a single CO2 molecule in the atmosphere, and disregards equilibrium processes which return other CO2 molecules to the atmosphere.

In a covered glass of water with an air space, where the liquid phase is in equilibrium with the gaseous phase, the residence time of any molecule of water vapour is very short. Water is evaporating from the surface at the same rate as water vapour is condensing back onto the surface, and no one would claim that water vapour disappears from the air space in a short time. It is a similar story for CO2 in the atmosphere, except that there are much longer processes which eventually (ie. slowly, over hundreds or thousands of years) reduce the CO2 concentration.

Further, the writer of the paper that is being referenced, R.H Essenhigh, is a chemical engineer who specialises in the combustion of fossil fuels. Wherever there is failed science, there is a link to the fossil fuel industry. And he is a member of Heartland.

Your question is not clearly specified. If you mean total human emissions then 40GT/yr of CO2 (10 GT/yr of carbon). If you meant to include natural emissions, who knows. But there has been no trigger to cause natural emissions to increase. Now – answer my questions.

bobdes…”Further, the writer of the paper that is being referenced, R.H Essenhigh, is a chemical engineer who specialises in the combustion of fossil fuels. Wherever there is failed science, there is a link to the fossil fuel industry. And he is a member of Heartland”.

Amazing!!! You are leaning on that old myth that anything anti-AGW is financed by Big Oil.

We have a plethora of alarmist propaganda on the web but one organization, Heartland, tries to organize and present skeptical papers and you classify it as pushing failed science and linked to the fossil fuel industry.

Tell me something, Mr. Rocket-scientist, what happens to us here on Earth if fossil fuel supply is suddenly shut off?

BTW…do you use fossil fuels? Gasp…you do??? Then you are supporting a failed science and you are linked to the fossil fuel industry.

You might also want to read the commentary from the journal editors regarding on how they erred in allowing Harde to hand pick his reviewers. Upon further investigation after-the-fact it was determined that non of Harde’s hand picked reviewers were experts or in any qualified to adjudicate the quality of his work.

Other thread is closed and I was relying to Kristian, put it here:
Kristian says:
March 31, 2019 at 1:19 AM

–The middle plate is warmer than the other two simply because its closer to the original power/heat source. It is in turn itself the heat source of the other two plates. Down the heat source hierarchy, so to say.

Just like the Sun being the original heat source, heating the surface of the Earth, and the surface in turn being the secondary heat source, heating the troposphere above. Hot => warm => cool. Down the hierarchy. Cold space is the final heat sink.–

So, in order to try to interpret what you saying:
The first plate is facing the “Cold space is the final heat sink”
and other side of plate, is facing the warmed second plate [which warmed by first plate].
And the second plate is not facing the “Cold space is the final heat sink” because it’s facing the warmed first plate and the warmed third plate which the second plate is warming. And third place facing second warm plate and the “Cold space is the final heat sink”.

Whereas I would say the first plate is *not* facing “Cold space is the final heat sink”, rather every square mm of it is facing the radiant energy of the sun and that space is not cold, but space [or the “Cold space is the final heat sink”] doesn’t act like an insulator to radiant heat [though small speck of sun in the vast space would be an insulator [but you can roughly ignore it’s insulative properties, cause it’s small relative to bigness of space, as you can also ignore the even smaller specks of planets, like Venus, vast number of space rocks and space dust].

So, space is neither hot or cold, but if facing the sun [or any kind of hot heat source] “space is “hot” rather than space is “cold”.
And how much an Ideal blackbody can absorb is how “hot” the space is that you are facing.

And if at 1 AU and if have ideal blackbody or blackbody which is facing the sun which has it’s back side insulated, then that space [or direct sunlight in the that space] reaches a temperature of 120 C.

[[And I am going to choose to say 120 C is hot.
As I could also choose to say 15 C [59 F] is not warm. ]]

I believe temperatures of around 127 C have been measured on the Moons surface. That might indicate several things. Maybe the estimates around 1366 – 1388 W/m2 for the solar constant are erroneous, maybe the measurement is incorrect, maybe the Stefan Boltzmann equation is wrong . . .

gbaikie, I believe solar cycles account for up to 2 W/m^2 of variation from peak to trough as well. So depending on how the solar cycle is timed at perihelion and aphelion it might mean a watt or two difference from those figures, but at that point its splitting hairs.

MF, using gbaikie figure of 1413 W/m^2 at perihelion and assuming lunar emissivity is 0.95 then that yields 129C which is in the ballpark of 127C.

Earth at perihelion is summer in southern Hemisphere.
The southern hemisphere is about 1 C cooler than Northern.
And AUS doesn’t have world’s hottest air temperature [though it can quite hot in summer].

bdg…”I believe solar cycles account for up to 2 W/m^2 of variation from peak to trough as well.”

The other day I think you were talking about photons, now you are talking about waves.

The 1360 W/m^2 of solar energy reaching TOA seems pulled from a hat. The spectrum over which it is averaged is immense and it tells us nothing about what is happening in the SW end of the spectrum, say in the UV range.

As far as I’m concerned, the “plate” discussion is finished. At least as far as criticizing the way “the Team” look at the problem. If anyone still wants to believe in that nonsense they can, but I don’t see the point in repeating discussions when it’s been so thoroughly beaten to death, already. If it comes up on here again I may just link back to previous comments, possibly elaborate a little. But, until people are ready to accept “the Team” were wrong, and move on to alternative solutions, I’m pretty much done with it.

These people don’t understand that
Energy Balance = Energy In – Energy Out
can be increased by either increasing Energy In OR by decreasing Energy Out.

But they will continue to fight a straw man by correctly stating that CO2 cannot add energy to the climate system without considering the other term. It’s akin to saying “the drain in my bathtub cannot affect the amount of water entering my bath, so blocking the drain cannot cause water level to rise”.

Pseudo-scientific climatological cultists apparently don’t understand that the Earth has cooled over the last four and a half billion years or so. Your stupid “energy balance” is nonsense. As Baron Fourier, (and anyone else but a pseudo-scientific climatological cultist) realises, night is colder than day. As Baron Fourier wrote –

“Thus the earth gives out to celestial space all the heat which it receives from the sun, and adds a part of what is peculiar to itself.”

In other words, under no circumstances does the Sun provide enough energy to stop the Earth from cooling.

The fumbling bumblers are reduced to peculiar irrelevant and pointless analogies. Overcoats, drains, potlids, and the many and varied fantasies that are supposed to demonstrate that the Earth’s surface has not actually cooled from its initial molten state, or even from the time when no part of the surface was cool enough to allow liquid water to condense.

All this, apparently, to support some mad idea jokingly referred to as the GHE, which cannot even be described.

CO2 heats nothing. There is no documented scientific phenomenon known as the GHE. Climate is the average of past weather records. Science? You must be joking!

entropic…”Lots of people here asserting different opinions on the interaction between CO2 and temperature, with the the subtext that their version is the only “truth””

How about using science? How about the Ideal Gas Law?

Most theories about CO2 have been pulled from a hat by climate modelers. They arbitrarily assigned CO2 a warming effect of 9% to 25%, depending on the amount of water vapour.

The Ideal Gas Law tells us that the effect of a gas in a mixture of gases is related to its mass percent. The degree of warming it can add is related to it’s partial pressure in the mixture and given a relatively constant volume like our atmosphere, that is major.

The gas in our atmosphere is a mixture with 99% of the mix being nitrogen and oxygen. CO2 makes up 0.04%. Explain to me how a gas with such a trivial percent mass could possibly add more than a very small fraction of a degree C for every rise in temperature of 1C for the entire mixture?

The evidence is there that it can’t. Over the past 20 years there has been virtually no true warming in the UAH record. We had a major EM spike in 2016, but other than that, the temperature has not increased. The real atmosphere is telling us that CO2 has an imperceptible effect on atmospheric temperature at its current mass percent.

P is pressure
V is volume
n is the number of moles of gas
R is the gas constant
T is temperature in K

This assumes a closed system, a constant quantity of gas isolated from outside influences and at constant energy. IIRC the technical term is adiabatic.

PV/T is constant. If you know two of themyou can calculate the third. If you change one, the others change to match.

You can see this in an adiabatic atmosphere. At the surface pressure and temperature are at a maximum and volume at a minimum.

As you gain altitude you measure lower pressure and temperature, while the volume per mole increases. Whatever the altitude, PV/T remains constant, energy content per mole remains constant.

This last is where you go astray. The Ideal Gas Law on its own says nothing about how energy flows through an atmosphere, nor does it say anything about changes in composition.

It doea play a part in energy transport by convection when conditions are non-adiabatic. Radiation from sunlight and back radiation warms the surface. The air above the surface increases in temperature, volume increases and density drops. This packet of air is now more bouyant than the surrouding gas and rises, keeping PV/T constant and carrying the absorbed energy with it.

If it is dry it will rise to the tropopause where the heat radiates to space. The cooler denser air then descends.

The Ideal Gas Law acts as a conveyer belt carrying heat upwards through the atmosphere. Its rate depends on temperature, but I dont see how it can control temperature.

The upward trend in the satellite water vapor retrieval (RSS) is considerably larger than in the ERA reanalysis of all global meteorological data. If there is a spurious component of the RSS upward trend, it suggests there will also be a spurious component to the sea level rise from altimeters due to over-correction for water vapor.

It would seem that if the SLR from satellite microwave altimeters are over-correcting for water vapor, then the very same result should apply equally to coastal tidal gages, particularly tide gages in areas subject to wind patterns of onshore breezes. Such tidal gages would have essentially the same water vapor concentrations in the overlying air as over the open oceans. So consequently, are the sat altimeters measuring the elevation of the locations of known tidal gages? If so, does the sat altimetry for the land surface show the same pattern as for the maritimesat altimetry nearby? If not, then the over-correction for water vapor should be in question.

I m 99% sure that the water vapor correction under discussion is part of the tropospheric delay correction applied to the satellite radar altimeter signal. Tidal gauges measure sea levels directly and don t use a radio signal propagated through the atmosphere and thus don t need (and mostly couldn t use) a water vapor correction. Caveat: A few gauges actually do use a local radio altimeter instead of a float and stilling well. But I don t think they bother with a water vapor correction because their signal path is very short. If they do make a water vapor correction, they probably base it on humidity measured at the gauge.